Download or Stream this Episode “The best thing that one can do with a Bible is to read it.”  That’s one of the proverbial words I remember from my beloved…

Download or Stream this Episode When I teach the text of Job in college classrooms, what students will tell me before we start reading, with only a bit of variation,…

Download or Stream this Episode In his famous essay “On the Reading of Old Books” C.S. Lewis praises the texts of ages past not because they were so often right–none…

Throughout her long history, Christ’s Church has been united and divided by words. For that reason, our creeds and confessions often have mixed reputations: they are the pure apostolic tradition;…

What is a monk? The word evokes the image of a man robed and cowled, tonsured in the West, bearded in the East. It recalls the architecture of the monastery,…

There’s a lot of poetry in the Bible. Anyone who flips through its pages can see how many have that telltale jagged edge of printed verse. But it’s not only…

Stream or download this episode. When I was in seminary, in the first year of this millennium of ours, I was quite sure I was not an evangelical: I was…

Stream or download this episode. Late in his posthumously-published Philosophical Investigations, in section 373, Ludwig Wittgenstein presents a cryptic aphorism regarding grammar: “Grammar tells what kind of object anything is.…

Ask what principle Martin Luther put at the center of his Protestant Reformation theology, and you’ll get several good answers: justification by faith alone; the primacy of scriptural authority over…

Download or Stream this Episode I remember translating the opening verses of 1 Timothy 2 for a Greek class in seminary.  I had read the passage in English, and I…

After His resurrection, Jesus called His eleven remaining disciples and gave them a mission: “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and…

Perhaps no era of biblical interpretation is less appreciated than the Middle Ages. After all, weren’t the medievals at best just perpetuators of patristic readings, and at worst the most…

Download or Stream this Episode Alasdair MacIntyre’s books taught me over the years to attend to the history of our moral language.  In some places, at some times, humility will…

Download or Stream this Episode Something went haywire with American politics not long into the social-media age.  Report after report told us that America was sick and tired of the…

Download or Stream this Episode On the first terrace of Purgatory proper, the pilgrim Dante looks up and looks down and sees art everywhere, art so grand that it surpasses…