The Reformation Character of the 1662 BCP
The growing popularity of the International Edition of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer has brought many positive fruits with perhaps the greatest being…
“Lest the Human Race Die in Despair”: A Poem on Luther for Reformation Day
The great and good celebration of the Festival of the Reformation is coming up this Sunday, and so for this week’s “Melanchthon Monday” I…
Thomas Jefferson’s statue, Uriah P. Levy, and the City of New York’s disregard for the foundations of Religious Liberty in the United States
The decision by the New York City Council to remove a statue of Thomas Jefferson from City Hall indicates a worrisome disregard for religious…
The Woke Non-Gospel at the Chappelle Netflix Protests
"Repent" or "do penance"?
Children’s Song Books
Given how much I am going on all the time about singing in the home (for instance, recently on the Ad Fontes podcast), a…
Preaching The Drama of Scripture With Zwingli
Getting to know Zwingli the preacher
The Order of the Commandments
The order of the commandments in the Decalogue has its own inner logic that writers have described in various ways. Below I have translated…
Warm Bodies: Another Melanchthonian Prayer Poem
For “Melanchthon Monday” this week, we’ve got a new poem–another prayer in verse, this time inspired by the creation account in Genesis 1. Melanchthon’s…
Notes on Assurance and OCD
I have always (in one way or another) battled with the assurance. From an extremely visceral fear of going to Hell in my early…
An Easter Egg in Plato’s Phaedo
I have a longish post I want to write on Plato’s Phaedo. This is not that post. This is a different one. When reading…
Evangelical Earnestness: Why it means we cant have nice stuff, and more tales from 1850s New England
In 1851 an orthodox Congregationalist minister delivered a sermon on earnestness to his parish in Danville, Vermont. He preached from Acts 4:13, which stated…
Church Music Is Just the Worst (Circa 1330)
Pope John XXII had some specific opinions on church music, which he expressed in his bull Docta sanctorum patrum. But some disciples of a…
Natural Law, Naturally Known
For this week’s “Melanchthon Monday,” a short passage on the law of nature, and our natural knowledge of it, that I have translated from…
Some thoughts on A Protestant Christendom? The World the Reformation Made.
In the past several weeks The Davenant Institute has published Andre Gazal’s edited edition of George Carleton’s Jurisdiction Regal, Episcopal, Papal and a larger…
The Virtue of Aggression
We live in an age wary of aggressive pastors. But is it always such a bad thing?
The Tyranny of “They Say”
“‘They say,’ is the monarch of this country, in a social sense. No one asks ‘who says it,’ so long as it is believed…
On Being a Christian in Late Modernity (Part 6: Modern Civilization as Unhomed Juvenility)
21. Bringing my analysis all the way to the ground, it is one thing to see our quandary, and another to know what to…
“Light-Conveying Light Eternal”: Another Greek Prayer in Verse
I had a lot of fun working on the Greek poem last week, so this week’s “Melancthon Monday” is once again…not Melanchthon. But, Christian…
Southern Puritan Episcopalians
The venerable southern historian and liberal Clement Eaton wrote in 1964 that the “great change in southern religion in 1860 from that of 1800…
A Time To Keep Silence
Are evangelicals right in thinking it is always time to speak?
Check Your (Authorial) Privilege
It is reasonable to suggest that the deep roots of the New Criticism–the position that what matters for the critical task is “the text,”…
“Bach did not intend to compose musical works”
My title is one of the famous, controversial sentences from a famous (amongst a certain crowd), controversial book, which I heartily commend to you…
“O Cosmic King”: A Greek Christian Prayer in Verse
For “Melanchthon Monday” this week I’m calling an audible; there is no Melanchthon at all. Sad, I know. But I have something for you…
The Tragedy of Politics
In his Parallel Lives, Plutarch links Theseus, the legendary King of Athens, with Romulus, the first (legendary?) King of Rome. As is the case…
Self-Fulfilling Prophecies and the Paradox of Politics
A couple of weeks ago, President Biden announced that he was at last going to put the massive and seemingly unlimited powers of the…
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…
Princeton and Confessionalism in the Early Republic
Princeton Seminary’s faculty in the Early Republic worked honestly and consistently to create a religious milieu devoted to historic creeds and confessions while also…
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…
Back to the Future, Medieval Saints, and Joy
Any man who knocks on the door of Comic-Con is looking for God.
Martin Luther on the Ministry of Shem
Throughout Martin Luther’s Lectures on Genesis, he returns again and again to a surprising theme. Shem, the son of Noah, was a public leader…
Be Ye Perfect
There are always a few books on the shelf in the bathroom that one grabs in those moments of peaceful, if somewhat uncomfortable, solitude.…
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…
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…
Preaching Church History as Story and Gospel
How can we weave church history effectively into our preaching of the Gospel?
On “Being Triggered” and the War for Your Soul
Some say that Jesus always “responded” to people, but never “reacted” to them. For our purposes, I’ll take “being triggered” as a reaction. On…
“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…
The Duty of Praying for Our Rulers
In the Spring of 1843, William A. Scott, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of New Orleans, delivered a sermon that caused such a…
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…
On Being a Christian in Late Modernity (Part 5: A Crisis of Trust)
17. To claim that modernity entails the simultaneous global re-negotiation of all human custom does not, crucially, imply that modernity is the death of…
“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…
