The Quietly Dangerous Suburban Church — How three architects in the 1950s tried to meld religion, modernism and suburbia: The marks of the church are word and sacraments (AC VII); thus, here is a study for the-spiritual-and-the-material, a key Reformation insight about the Gospel. To what extend are other spatial elements important and edifying? The 1950s and ’60s […]
How Sci-Fi and Fantasy Help Us Understand the Divine: this series of six articles explores ways that the literature of fantasy and sci-fi intersect with themes in the Bible and, more broadly, religion. Students may find much to agree and disagree with in what these writers propose.
Boston hospital expels doctor over LGBT views: After more than 10 years of tension and conflict over his hospital’s institutional endorsement of LGBT activities, urologist Paul Church lost his final appeal to the Board of Directors of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) to reconsider the hospital’s decision to expel him and terminate his medical […]
Expert Religion: The Politics of Religious Difference in an Age of Freedom and Terror — The American foreign policy establishment has a history of collaboration with scholars and experts across disciplines. In the context of the war on extremism, these partnerships are taking new forms. This essay examines the intersection between religion and global governance in an […]
The Artistry of Grace: The Lutheran tradition insists that the spiritual is not above the material. Dinesen’s stories all celebrate physicality as something deeply spiritual. “Babette’s Feast” does so in excelsis. In style it is stark but shining; in plot it is unpretentious—indeed nothing more than one long anecdote—but also a complex interweaving of characters and […]
Habit-Forming — Liturgies of Education: The liturgy is one of the Spirit’s instruments for shaping godly persons and communities, and the same is true in education. This 46 min. video from Peter Leithart will explore implications of this perspective and present examples of healthy and unhealthy educational rituals. Every educational model assumes an answer to the […]
Why I’m Not a Conscientious Objector is another installment in the CT series on Christians and service in the armed forces. This first-person account explores the writer’s tension as he explores an Anabaptist community opposed to such service and his participation in Centurions’ Guild, a group of veterans and service members that helps Christian communities have […]
An empirical analysis of emotional language in legal briefs before the Supreme Court: Supreme Court opinions employ controversial emotional language aimed to tug at the heart strings and to provoke ire, yet the Justices counsel lawyers to avoid such emotional language. “Our model predicts a 0.61 probability that the petitioner wins a Justice’s vote when […]
In this assessment of ethical theory in current bioethics, David S. Oderberg, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading, UK, discusses six current confusions and errors in agenda-driven bioethics studies and reports: “You could say they misunderstand the function of argument, which is to get to the truth, not to advance a previously-adopted policy.” […]
The ADF has filed a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court behalf of a Trinity Lutheran Church’s Child Learning Center, Columbia, MO, which was denied access to a state program that provides recycled tires to surface children’s playgrounds. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit upheld a federal court’s decision that ruled the state was justified in […]
