Fencing Bear at Prayer

Another classic from the archive!  This article was originally published for Christmas, but the  argument  works for all Christian festivals, including All Hallows’ Eve.  What would it be like to find yourself inside a fairy-story? Would you wear the costume of a saint? I have 1000 words to convince you to celebrate Christmas—or, as one of MILO’s Facebook fans put it, “The Jesus Myth.” Right. I could try to convince you that Christmas is a fully Christian celebration, having nothing to do with supposed appropriations of pagan festivals, but that presumes that you care about celebrating Christmas as Christian in the first  place . What I need to do is convince you that the myth matters  as a myth . This is not a comfortable thought for many modern Christians, used as we are to the accusation that we worship a fairy-tale sky god. If you are a Protestant, you can blame Rudolf Bultmann (d. 1976), the great German Biblical scholar famous...

“Jesus, with you I will die and rise again.” Australian publicist and author John Moran joined me on my podcast to talk about how this simple mantra can change your life. John explains how he came to this mantra from his own experience advising government programs in Australia on mental health. We talk about how the West has lost its sense of prayerfulness in the past 50 years and what this has done to the culture. Listen at  Fencing Bear at Prayer ! Buy John’s book:  The Resurrection Mantra: Build Hope and Resilience into Your Life   With the Resurrection Mantra John Moran has resurrected, and made easily accessible and understandable for everyone, one of the great spiritual traditions handed down to us by early Christians. This is the use of a set phrase, in times of quiet and meditation, to anchor our understanding of profound and essential life truths. In this case it is the most profound truth of all, the death-to-new life rhythm of life—demonstrated so emp...

I gave a short talk the other day to the undergraduate majors in our department. It was one of seven “lightning” presentations that I and my departmental colleagues gave to demonstrate the variety of approaches and topics that the students might encounter in history as a discipline. One of us talked about the minting and iconography of medieval German coins. Another talked about the significance of the Underwriters Laboratory and its logo. Another spoke on the history of the British Empire and how there was no such thing as the “American revolution” (he said it three times!). Another described her discovery of tango music in the records of the former Soviet Union. Another told the story of Germany’s museums. Another showed us early 20th-century images of speech.  I talked about masks—and what they teach us about virtue. At least, that is what I wanted to talk about. But what I mainly wanted to do was show pictures of Milo.   Particularly this one.  Pub...

Another classic from the archives! Dan Brown is rich because, like MILO, he understands symbolism. Just look at the hero of his thrillers, Robert  Langdon , Professor of Religious Symbology, Harvard University. Nobody in the modern academy is a professor of religious  symbology !  Jordan B. Peterson, Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, might come close with his  Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of  Belief . But even he calls himself a scientist, not a symbologist, almost as if it were too embarrassing to admit belief in the power of symbols and signs. It would be easy to blame Jacques Derrida and the other postmodernists, but the embarrassment had set in long before  Of  Grammatology   became required reading in what used to be called literature courses. J.R.R. Tolkien complained about it throughout his career. Think about it. What kind of stories are rich in symbolism? Myths. Fairy stories. Stories for chi...

Once upon a time, there was a man named Theophilus who made a bargain with the devil. Thank God that Our Lady was able to help him! Do you want to know the full story? Listen here ! * The Prayer of Theophilus O miserable wretch that I am, what have I done and what have I wrought?...  Where shall I, unhappy sinner, go, who have denied my Christ and his holy mother ( Christum meum et sanctam eius genitricem ) and have made myself a servant of the devil ( seruum diaboli ) through a chirograph of wicked warrant ( per nefande cautionis chirographum )?  Who, do you think, will be able to pull it away from the hand of the devil, the destroyer, and help me?  Why was it necessary for me to become acquainted with that wicked Hebrew who should be burned?  (For this same Hebrew had been condemned a little while before by law and judge.) Why indeed? For thus are they honored, who forsaking God and the Lord, run to the devil....  Woe ...

From the archives! I teach at the University of Chicago. Admit it, you’re jealous.  Not because the campus is beautiful (it is!) or because it is crawling with Nobel prize winners (ditto, although the economists do keep somewhat to themselves in their beautiful newly renovated building). Not because we ranked number three—along with Yale!—in the U.S. News and World Report for 2018 , or because we are still the place where fun comes to die, which should give us points against Yale . You’re jealous because we have the best university president in the country , who says things like this : It is the obligation of all of us who aspire to true excellence in education and research to forcefully and unequivocally defend an environment of free expression on campuses. And this : To stifle free expression and open discourse and suppress speech that you don’t like is just an invitation for others to do the same.  And this : Those who argue for avoiding disco...

In honor of the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, Dustin Quick had a few questions for me about Our Lady and her place in the Temple Tradition: Is Catholic Marian theology and piety based on Greco-Roman paganism which smothered and ultimately replaced an otherwise “pure and simple” Jewish-Christian faith?   How can Catholics honour her so much, when she is barely mentioned in the Bible, whereas Christ is saturating every page of the Scriptures?  Who is the Mother of the Lord in the Old Testament? What was her role? What were some of her symbols?  Why do we claim that Catholicism, with its view of Jesus and Mary, is actually more “authentically Jewish”—more faithful to the oldest Temple religion of ancient Israel— than Second Temple and post-Temple Rabbinic Judaism (and “Messianic Judaism”)?  Who is “Lady Wisdom,” and how is She related to Mary? We had quite the conversation! Join us ! Image credit: Margaret Barker, personal communication