Articles

Sensucht: Sonnet XC

by Donald Williams When the fog obscures the outlines of the treesBut breaks to show the sharpness of the stars,And the blood feels sudden chill although the breezeIs warm, and all the old internal scars From stabbing beauty start to ache anew;When mushrooms gather in a fairy ringAnd every twig and grass-blade drips with dewAnd then a whippoorwill begins to Read More ›

The Lewis Legacy-Issue 83, Winter 2000 From the Mailbag

Well, no sooner do I write to you than I get a new Lewis Legacy. I had somehow not heard about “the announcement that there is post-1950 ink on the 1938 manuscript of the Dark Tower”! And so now, all of a sudden, the manuscript appears to have been written “circa 1958”! Beautiful. I suppose they have some evidence for Read More ›

How I Made my Primavera Discovery

Written in Response to an Inquiry In 1997 I almost died and was hospitalized for a week or two and pulled through. I was in the midst of producing my three-volume work Dante’s Divine Comedy: Journey to Joy. When I got home I was on intravenous medication with home nursing visits. During this time I had the task of meticulously Read More ›

Maybe “Modern Man…” Is More Modern Than Many Have Mused

by Jason Pratt of Dyer, TN(JasonPratt@Compuserve.com) I’ve been a student of C. S. Lewis’ theological writings for over ten years, and for much of this time I’ve been reading Lewis’s works aloud on tape for a hobby. (This helps me to use Lewis’s tools in propounding my own sound philosophical base for theism in general and Christianity in particular.) This Read More ›

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Hand of prayer person worship with light
Image Credit: BillionPhotos.com - Adobe Stock

The Faith of a Futurist

Every year I host a conference on the future of the Internet in a world of bandwidth abundance. On the last day, I hold a debate or panel on the religious significance of the technological disputes. Every year, some attendees object to this insertion of theology into the midst of a meeting otherwise devoted to the higher vocations of microelectronics Read More ›

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Sonnet
Licensed from Adobe Stock

Detecting Design?

In The Design Inference (Cambridge, 1998), I argue that specified complexity is a reliable empirical marker of intelligent design. A long sequence of random letters is complex without being specified. A short sequence of letters like “the,” “so,” or “a” is specified without being complex. A Shakespearean sonnet is both complex and specified. Thus in general, given an event, object, Read More ›

Natural Born Lawyers

Books reviewed The Natural Law:A Study in Legal and Social History and Philosophy by Heinrich Albert Rommen, Liberty Fund, 306 pp., $27. In Defense of Natural Law by Robert P. George, Oxford University Press, 354 pp., $65. Aquinas’s Theory of Natural Law: An Analytic Reconstruction by Anthony J. Lisska Oxford University Press, 336 pp., $24.95. Natural Law in Judaism by Read More ›

What’s in a Name

Anti-WTO demonstrators continue to get the benefit of the doubt from many in the media and even from some public officials. That benefit consists of a supposed distinction commonly made between the ‘bad’ WTO protesters who broke windows, assaulted policemen and set fire to dumpsters, and the ‘good’ protesters — supposedly everybody else in the anti-WTO ranks. The ‘bad’ protesters, Read More ›

Review God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution by John Haught

I suppose it's the residual effect of original sin, but I enjoy reviewing books I disagree with more than ones I agree with. After all, who wants to spend 1500 words inventing new ways of saying "me, too" and "yes, that's right"? Much better to bring a contrasting view to the author's work, focus on areas of difference, and enjoy the simple pleasures of controversy. So, since I had heard he was skeptical of a theory of intelligent design in biology — of which I am an advocate — I looked forward to reviewing Georgetown theologian John Haught's God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution. What a disappointment! Looking back over my margin notes for this elegantly written book, I find I have scribbled on various pages: "Great!"; "I agree"; "!"; "interesting"; "Hmm"; and four "Good"s in a row. Read More ›