Patriarcha: The Complete Political Works. By Robert Filmer. Perth, AU: Imperium Press, 2021. 316 pp. $21.00 (paper). Liberal democracy is under fire these days, if the growing number of books critiquing it is any indication.[1] As part of this re-evaluation of liberalism, some on the reactionary right have written at length concerning what sort of…
Benjamin Hoadly, most infamous as bishop of Bangor, is punished. Touted as the symbol of the spiritual dearth that was the Augustan church, High Churchmen and Evangelicals excoriated the supposedly “Latitudinarian” (read: rationalist or modernist) captivity of the Church. Ministers worried about hobbies and tithes, reduced to employees of the Parliamentary Leviathan, the Hanoverian episcopal…
Article I. Of Faith in the Holy Trinity. THERE is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the Maker and Preserver of all things, both visible and invisible. And in the unity of this Godhead there be three Persons, of one substance, power, and…
7 Now when the Pharisees gathered together to him, with some of the scribes, who had come from Jerusalem, 2 they saw that some of his disciples ate with hands defiled, that is, unwashed. 3 (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they wash their hands, observing the tradition of the elders; 4 and when they come from the…
Come, happy December, who shall observe you, who shall preserve you? Since golden October declined into sombre November And the apples were gathered and stored, and the land Became brown sharp points of death in a waste of water and mud, The New Year waits. We wait with it. Here let us stand, close by…
Two months ago, Christian Wagner wrote a controversial article in the pages of this publication, titled “A Catholic Anglican Rule of Faith.” Against both a “Reformed option” and an “Evangelical option,” he asserted a “Catholic Anglican option” for a rule of faith. I wish it had been a catholic option, and not an essentially sectarian…
For W.H. Auden, there are two general ways of thinking of time—either history inevitably repeats itself, locking events into an established cycle where “time turns round itself in an obedient circle,” or history is made up of ordered times, of a regiment of generations marching toward a goal, of a string of events that are…
A recent Gallup poll indicating that church attendance in the United States has fallen below 50% for the first time shocked many American Christians. Conversely, a random internet search of “most popular Christian books of all time” yielded exactly what I expected to find: C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity was on nearly every list, often…
I was born in a shadow country Of roofless temples smudged with smoke, Where even the roadside shrines Sat jilted, their chintzy dioramas Strung with strands of christmas lights That lit the paths of small tin soldiers Shouldering their guns into darkness To hollow drums and distant music. O sing, cicada, sing… I grew up…
I felt sick to my stomach. It was the middle of April 2020, and we had been shut down for a few weeks. In the chaos and isolation, I foolheartedly took to read the classic novel Kristen Lavransdatter. It is a sweeping story of faith, sin, redemption, and to my utter shock, the bubonic plague….
