Posts

The Tolkien Legacy

It’s a rare, if not exceptional, case. In an era where most people would sell their souls to be talked about, Christopher Tolkien has not expressed himself in the media for 40 years. No interviews, no announcements, no meetings — nothing. It was a decision he made at the death of his father, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973), British author of the hugely famous…

Orthodoxy at the Emmys

Not that I watch awards shows more than perhaps once every five years or so (and I didn’t see this one, either), but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that this is the first time that Orthodox Christian monastic enclave Mount Athos was mentioned in an Emmy speech. This is Jonathan Jackson winning his fifth Emmy. Readers may recall my…

Why can’t God love me the way I am?

One of the perhaps most pressing theological questions of our time and place is answered beautifully in this post from Jim John Marks: The question is not “why can’t God love me the way I am”, the question is “why can’t I love God the way I am”. And it is the pursuit of the answer to that question which opens the door to…

The Mass Cult of Big

The following is essentially a piecing together of selections from a Facebook thread in which I participated today. The following quotation led off the discussion: We have become fascinated by the idea of bigness, and we are quite convinced that if we can only ‘stage’ something really big before the world, we will shake it, and produce a mighty religious awakening. – D. Martin…

Evangelicals at the Eucharist

I was fascinated today to run across this call to the Eucharist, written from a Reformed perspective, by Peter J. Leithart, pastor of Trinity Reformed Church in Moscow, Idaho, and an eminent Evangelical theologian. (Seeing this, along with my recent posts on Evangelicals observing Lent, I’ve decided to create a new category for posts on this weblog: Evangelical Appropriation of Tradition.) This is a…