The Humanitas Forum

Should we fit in?  Should we hunker down? Should we retreat?  Should we engage?  How should Christians respond to the challenges of living in a post-Christian culture?  The answers to these questions will be decisive as …

The barbarians “have already been governing us for quite some time.”  That’s one of the lessons that Alasdair MacIntyre has tried to teach us—a lesson that for some Christians has been slowly sinking in during the 34 years since …

Boredom is the all-encompassing name we give our discontent in this late modern age.  Boredom gained prominence as a social condition in the 18^th century when the word was invented, according to Patricia Meyer Spacks, author of Boredom: …

The secular assault on the Christianity is, in essence, a project of banishing Christian practice to the private lives of believers.  You can keep your Christianity if you reduce it to ideas, feelings, and experiences.

But the ferocity of …

The life and death of Polycarp reminds us of Hebrews 11:35:  “Some were tortured, refusing to accept release, so that they might rise again to a better life.”  Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, would not have been burned at …

“If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist” is a taken-for-granted axiom of our age.  It is part of everyday thinking as well as a key component in medical and other forms of research.  It has played an …

Shame is a powerful motivator—one of the most powerful!  It hurts to feel inadequate, to feel stupid, to be counted among the uncool.

Most people are willing to pay a significant price—sometimes an enormous price—to avoid being an …

What is the chief end of God?  The “chief end of God is to glorify us and to be useful to us indefinitely.”  This inversion of the opening line of the Westminster Confession is theologian Leander Keck’s way …

The Church has never before had the task of evangelizing neo-pagans.  The new pagans are very different from their earlier counterparts, the ones faced by the early Christians.  Evangelization “this time will not be the same” … “nothing …

Commencement speakers at secular colleges don’t usually deliver sermons.  But sometimes they do, even though they call them “commencement addresses” and they don’t cite scripture.  What these rare individuals do—along with a few poets, musicians, novelists, film makers …