In his Parallel Lives, Plutarch links Theseus, the legendary King of Athens, with Romulus, the first (legendary?) King of Rome. As is the case with most of the paired Lives, Plutarch offers a comparison at the end. He notes that both Theseus and Romulus were...
E.J. Hutchinson
Piercing Heaven
For this week's "Melanchthon Monday," a short poem--only a couplet--on prayer, inspired by Luke 24. EX LUCA 24. CAPITE.Ut tua pertingat, penetretque precatio caelum, Ardenti fiat speque fideque frequens. "From Luke 24"If you desire that your prayer may ascend up to...
Calling on God in “Truth”
Psalm 145:18 says, "The LORD is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth" (ESV). If we read the Psalms in light of Christ as, e.g., Augustine tells us too, we might think of John 14:6: "Jesus said to him, 'I am the way, and the truth, and the life....
The Theologian of the Holy Cross
September 14 marks Holy Cross Day. In honor of the cross of Christ, here are a couple of justly famous paragraphs from Martin Luther's Heidelberg Disputation (1518) on what it means to be a theologian. 20. He deserves to be called a theologian, however, who...
The Duty of Magistrates?
I didn't have time to prepare a proper "Melanchthon Monday" this week. On the other hand, I discovered via Twitter this morning that one of my essays is appearing in this forthcoming Davenant volume, the title of which is "'Nursing Fathers': The Magistrate and the...
“Attending Only to the Shell and Husk of History”
At long last, I'm making good on my promise to finish off the Burke series. In the first two posts, we looked at the problems--and they are legion--caused by revolutionary "justice" reformers, content to raze civil society as a result of the delusional and infantile...
How to Pray
For Melanchthon Monday this week, we're taking a hiatus from the series "Then in Distress We Upraise," but don't worry: we'll get back to it. (I know you were worried.) Instead, this week I want to look at a passage from the last phase of the Loci Communes on prayer,...
“The Worst Sort of Tyrant: The Philosophic Doctrinaire”
The other day, I mentioned Charles Oman's Seven Roman Statesmen of the Later Republic and his description Tiberius Gracchus. Here is the brilliant conclusion to his chapter on the revolutionary "justice" reformer. I had considered making a sarcastic comment about how...
“Then in Distress We Upraise” (3)
Time once again for #MelanchthonMonday! This is the third installment dealing with a petitionary poem by Joachim Camerarius and its Nachleben. In Part 1, we looked at the poem itsel. Last week, we looked in Part 2 at a letter Melanchthon wrote to Camerarius in which...
Two Cheers for the Great Man Theory of History
Thus British military historian Charles Oman in the incipit of Seven Roman Statesmen of the Later Republic (1902): There was a time, not so very long ago, when the taunt was true that history was written as if it were a mere string of anecdotal biographies of great...