It shouldn’t surprise us that Thomas has written about thankfulness. There are very few topics that he did not cover. He devotes an entire question of the Summa to thankfulness. (It is part of his section on justice.) I’ll just mention a distinction—one that surprised me—that he makes in article 4 of the question on [...]
Tags: Thomas Says
As Christians, we are a people who live in a present that is shaped definitively by the past and the future. The meaning of our present, of our contemporary lives and relationships, is fixed, but not yet revealed. We take shape only in relationship to the eternal, which Boethius famously defined as the “simultaneously whole [...]
I wonder if I have presumed too far upon the generous gift of a friend. When I was married over a year ago I was graciously given a sabbatical rest from my labors as a Mere Orthodoxy contributor in keeping with the spirit, although not the letter, of Deuteronomy 24:5 which states, “When a man [...]
One of the common complaints against traditional evangelicalism is that it has been held captive by a distinctly Western approach to rationality that eschews mystery and narrative. The central target of this complaint is the “Enlightenment,” with its emphasis on reason to the detriment of revelation. Shane Hipps’ first book seems to walk down this road, [...]
After discussing questions about killing plants, animals, and sinners by private citizens, public officials, and clerics, Thomas picks up the weighty and delicate subject of suicide. His position is that “it is altogether unlawful to kill oneself.” Thomas isn’t messing around here. He usually reserves language like “altogether unlawful” for serious purposes. And this is [...]
Tags: Thomas Says
Michael Bird, a New Testament scholar of the first rate, highlights Paul’s statement in 1 Corinthians 8:3 that “anyone who loves God is known by him” before going on to quote Richard Hays’ statement that “what counts is not so much our knowledge of God as God’s knowledge of us.” I don’t know about how [...]
In my response to Frank Beckwith and John Mark Reynolds in The City, I pointed out that any that Christendom is impossible until evangelicals recover a robust notion of the Church’s existence as a culture–and maybe not even then. The notion of Church as culture, though, begs the difficult and tangled question of what kind [...]