Every story of thought and thinking runs into its own kinds of problems.  Progressive accounts do well showing how predecessors were not quite as sharp or as moral as we…

If a tree falls by an axe, the stump will, given enough time, grow back. Human beings who fall violently have no such hope–we never rise again.  With that image,…

Do not think any man happy until he has died, free from suffering.  That line, or something like it depending on the translator, ends the grand tragedy Oedipus Tyrannous, Oedipus…

 “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”  Growing up under that Constitutional law, even as an amendment, gave me the idea…

Liberty has always carried tricky questions with it.   Most folks in 2025 would agree that human beings should have liberty, but how one becomes free persists as a debate. …

My own tradition within the Church was an early adopter of the motto “No creed but Christ.” For what intentions are worth, my forerunners seem to have had good ones:…

When I was a novice in Biblical Studies Hans Frei’s book The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative invited me to consider not only the world that gave us the Bible but…

Slogans have always occupied our public attention, and the ways that an enemy redefines a slogan can be as important as the phrase’s original connotation.  We can learn a fair…

Taken down to their etymological components, scriptures are any written texts and literature is any human craft involving letters, usually of some alphabet or another.  But etymological roots don’t go…

 If you don’t spend much time around Biblical-studies people, the neologism “parallelomania” might be a new one on you, so let me explain: for different reasons, some writers in Biblical…

History as a practice examines the contingent.  Everything that leaves evidence of having-happened might have happened otherwise, and nothing that has come to be except that it displaced other things…

The stereotype, whether we want to dismantle it or acknowledge it, holds that those who teach college English begin a quest in graduate school to be rid of teaching writing.…

Philoctetes is not the best-known Sophocles tragedy, but its questions stick with me.  When the title character insists on his dignity as a man of war, he runs afoul of…

In our current age of social media filter bubbles, a twenty-four-hour news channel to suit any worldview, and the ability to go through an entire day without speaking to another…

On April 16, 1927, Joseph Ratzinger was born in a little village in Bavaria, Germany’s southernmost state. Raised in a Catholic family in traditionally Catholic Bavaria, it isn’t surprising that…