Interim America

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:44 pm by Peter Leithart

Interim America 2017-09-06T23:44:18+06:00 Peter Leithart

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

“Interim America” is Rosenstock-Huessy’s name for the American order during the period between 1890-1940. This is an “interim” because it is not a stable order, but a transition between the old and the new. This interim period is ordered by the suburb, the factory, the highway, and the loss of a sense of sin. He describes interim America thus: “The Interim America of 1890 to 1942 saw the Church recede into the suburbs. The ministry, thereupon, disintegrated into humanitarians, social works, pacifists. The individual cannot be blamed. Social conditions made the Churches unreal. They no longer stood at the center of the cross of a man’s life, but stood on the side of private leisure.”

Suburban life, ERH argues, is “unreal because it shuns pain and conflict.” Suburbs are racially, socially, economically uniform, and thus the suburb does not have the social tensions characteristic of most social organizations. The suburb also excludes the basic transitions of life – birth and death – pushing both off into clinical settings. No one is born, or dies, in the suburbs. Birth is the on place where “we ever experience the law of creation,” the law that creation comes through travail. Suburbanites are never allowed to learn this truth. Suburban life is “prudent, kind, barren,” and has a “mentality” instead of a “soul”: “Mentality is what is left of the soul when you subtract the crucifying experiences that bear fruit in more energetic and vital human relationships. Mentality knows nothing of jubilant joy and black despair, of yelling and cursing, moaning and groaning, shouting and dancing and weeping and singing.” As a result, suburban speech becomes mere “verbiage”: “Its mentality emasculates the Word.” Speech cannot be effective and real unless it arises from the Cross, and suburbanites deliberately eliminate the Cross.

The paradox of suburban life is that it provides “too much peace” externally while giving “little peace” within. Try as they might, suburbanites cannot eliminate the cross, and because suburbia “makes it indecent to share the agonies of our souls” it “puts a burden on the individual which he is far too weak to bear.” Human beings are able to bear the cross only by uniting with each other, and “neurosis and nervous breakdown flourish in the suburb for lack of a fellowship based on the deeper urgencies and passions.” Suburban man is fearful of extremes, so he “plays safe, adopts a minimum attitude.” This is the “philosophy of adjustment, of golden mediocrity,” and it means that life has “no real excitement, no real devotion, no real fight, no real love.” This can be healed only if the heart yields “itself with singleness of purpose to its trust in the fellowship of mankind, else it will remain split and alone.” Suburban man has deliberately forgotten that “being torn is a human privilege,” and therefore cannot find his real redemption. He is in danger, as a result, of seeking totality in some political power that promises “unity, fixity, and security.” Suburbanites risk becoming Nazis.

The economic form of interim America centers on the factory, which robs work and business of inspiration. Factories treat men as another natural resource, providing physical energy to produce goods. The “man in a factory is treated virtually like an inanimate object. He is no longer a person but a function, a replaceable cog in a machine.” Workers work together, but they don’t form a unit in the way a football team or army regiment do; rather, their identity is “the identity of drops of water in an unending stream of work which is done day and night.” A factory is “not a human habitation”; it is a house for “Nature” with a capital-N, treating “man as a part of a force and as part of material” to be “laid on” and “laid off” like switches or steam. As part of Nature, a man is a Self – nothing but an atom of humanity, not a father, son, brother, husband, but only a self. Homes, by contrast, “drown self” in a myriad of roles. The combination of suburb and factory thus creates a split in the personality of a modern American: He is a family man in the suburb, but only an element of the labor force in the factory. In sum, the man in the factory is “soulless.”

In a factory system, work no longer is linked to the development of character and soul. People change jobs rapidly and repeatedly throughout a career, and so their work is never “something through which his whole personality can ripen and take shape.” Factory-economies tend to weaken loyalties across the board, as they weaken loyalties to the particular workplace. The result is that “personality is dwarfed,” as mena re isolated from one another: “Nobody can become a person in a void, but only in relations with other people.”

Perhaps the most significant criticism of the factory system is that it destroys the temporal rhythm of life. We are “obsessed with speed at all costs,” and this gives a “rootless, rhythmless quality” to our lives. Modern man is impatient, and wants to find a solution to all our problems now. ERH is not so naïve to think that the factory system can or ought to be dismantled: “I would consider it insanity to abandon ways of life which have proved efficient.” He is, however, “interested in the price of this achievement.” Instead, he issues a challenge “to find constructive ways of overcoming the sterile divorce of labor and leisure, and of mastering the sequence of changes which industrial society makes inevitable in every individual life.”

ERH says that the “special problem” of this man who lives between factory and suburb is “the fact that he is expected to speak two languages” and to live between names and namelessness: “Here is a human being who is full of names half of the time, and void of names during the other half.” Where is the unity of this man? ERH proposes to find this unity in “the rudimentary situation in which he is neither suburban nor factorial, and yet know both situations as waiting for him.” The real man who is attempting to discover his deepest identity is the man commuting between home and office, office and home. ERH finds it interesting that modern literature pays more and more attention to the commuter, and, borrowing from one such novel, suggests that the “full-sized person . . . can only be met where he feels condescension for his smaller selves.” That is to say, the commuter alone on the highway, who moves from home to office with a feeling of lowering himself, and from office to home with a feeling of lowering himself. The true soul of modern man “cannot become articulate unless it is met on the highway.” Only here is he “neither suburban nor official,” and only here is he cleansed of the “qualities which make him small.” To see the man in full, we must seem him neither reduced to a cog by the factory nor reduced to passionless prudence in the suburb.

ERH unpacks this point in part with a discussion of curses. Society today shuns cursing, but ERH sees the ability to curse as a sign of greatness of soul: “He who will not curse the shortcomings of his procession as a lawyer, a teacher, a doctor, a priest, always will have to defend it beyond the health of his soul. The doctor who defends medicine as it is today, against all outside criticism, and nowhere bands together unselfishly with those same critics, must do harm to his soul.” On the highway, between the office and home, t

he doctor knows better; he knows something is wrong with the world, and recognizes “the hell of mere functioning.” The soul on the highway, therefore, is a soul in “search of groups where people in the world of the cosmos . . . gather so that the chaos, the darkness, and the confusion may die down within them.” Souls that gather to admit the chaos and darkness “put an end to them.” Without this, we are condemned to perpetual social chaos: “The social chaos cannot become cosmos unless man takes this chaos upon his own mind as his own mental chaos, unless he drops his mask of academic observer and his pride of mental self-sufficiency, usually called objectivity.”

Christianity addresses this situation as “essentially war in peace: it distributes the bloody sacrifices of the battlefront by an even but perpetual spread of sacrifices through the whole fabric of life.” Christianity make daily war instead of world wars, particularly a daily war against indolence. Only those who have been torn by this kind of daily sacrifice can make a future. The church of “extra ecclesia nulla salus” lost confidence in the early modern period. Instead, the church of today and tomorrow must “remember that Extra crucem nulla ecclesia: Outside the Cross, there is no Church.”

ERH anticipates the objection: Why preach the Cross in a world without sin? Sin does evaporate in a world where no actions or words are taken seriously: “The great name of sin rests on the assumption that I can act and that it matters what I say.” But now my actions are no longer mine, and my words are not important. Sin has “become collective,” as the groups to which a man belongs become sinners for him and as he and his wife “fall victim to all the drives in the community.” This “new nature of sin saps our vitality and dwarfs uys. It destroys our true nature.”

The factory and the suburb are facts, but they don’t determine the character of the future. Futures are always breaks with the past, struggles against trends. The future has to be created.

More specifically, he sees interim America as a period in which we have “seceded from our Christian era.” This is the “interim” because “people seceded from the fundamentals without putting anything in their place. Unless we recognize this interim as a secession we shall have neither the desire nor the power to return to our era.” Without this return, “we are bound to kill each other by word and deed. Our peace will depend on our common goal.” The secession was not ignorance; “We had reason to secede from the era.” The reason was that the beginning of suburb and factory made Christianity into a “mere set-up,” which “nobody can worship.” The church became old, and any future requires the church to rise again to new life.

Why does the Christian “set-up” from the past no longer work? Suburban life “makes every girl an image of the Arts, and the factory every body an image of the Sciences.” This departs from the post-Reformation concentration on Church and State. The “Christian Reform asked the members of the family to be mothers and fathers first of all, the modern stress is on boys and girls, men and women. Church and state thought of us as parents and children; the Arts and Sciences think of us as individuals.” ERH goes into some detail explaining how the Reformation and Counter-Reformation made the family into a spiritual unit and how it freed people children from following the profession of their fathers.

In our day, suburb and factory have combined to weaken the Christian household of the Reformation: “The whole realm of moral freedom, which balanced the outer realm of law, has given way to the hard laws of the industrial system. Man no longer earns his living in a private vocation but in an industrial function. The household is no longer an economic unit: the modern individual no longer ripens into a person through household responsibility; work and worship are divorced.” Labor is divorced from teaching, and the State “threatens to become an all-engulfing leviathan.” The individual formed by Protestantism is no longer viable since “its economic foundations in reality have crumbled.” Thus, the specifically post-Reformation Christian set-up has become obsolete. Secession from the Christian era was understandable under the circumstances. But, ERH asks, at what cost? The seceders “gave a horrible answer to a terrible dilemma. Granted the dilemma, they still became deserters. And they tried to make the upholstery of the suburb so thick that the rumbling of war and revolution could not be heard through the velvet curtains, the carpets and rugs of progressive education.”

Post-Reformation Christianity is over; but secession has not worked. What ERH opens is the possibility for a renewal of the Christian era, a Christian future.

History

Previous Post

February 21, 2007

Who Defines “Reformed”?

Next Post

February 21, 2007 Sacramental piety

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category 1 Corinthians 1-2 Samuel 1968 Abelard Abortion Abraham Acedia AD 70 Adam Smith Addiction Advent Advertising Aeneid Aesthetics Africa African Christianity African Church African religion Age Aging Agriculture Airline industry Alabama Alasdair MacIntyre Albania Alcohol Allegory Alms Alternative Medicine Ambrose America American Christianity American culture American economy American Evangelicals American Foreign Policy American history American Literature American Military American Politics American Religion American Revolution Anagogy Analytic Philosophy Anamnesis Ancient Egypt Ancient Greece Ancient history Ancient Near East Ancient Religion Angels Anglican Church Anglicanism Animism Anointing of the Sick Anselm Anthropology Anthropomorphism anti-Catholicism Antiquities Antonio Lopez apocalypse Apocalyptic Apocalyptic language Apostles Creed Aquinas Archeology Architecture Arianism Aristotle Ark of the Covenant Art Art History Ascension Aseity Assurance Athanasius Atheism Athens atonement Attention Attributes Augustine Austin Farrer Authority autonomy Avant-garde Awe Bach Ballooning Balzac Banking Bankruptcy Baptism Baptists Baseball Basketball Bavinck Beatitudes Beauty Behavioral Economics Being Benedict XVI Benjamin Benjamin Franklin Beowulf Berkeley Bernie Sanders Bertrand Russell Bestiary Bible Bible - criticism Bible - NT Bible - NT - 1 Corinthians Bible - NT - 1 John Bible - NT - 1 Peter Bible - NT - 2 Corinthians Bible - NT - 2 Peter Bible - NT - Acts Bible - NT - Colossians Bible - NT - Ephesians Bible - NT - Galatians Bible - NT - Gospels Bible - NT - Hebrews Bible - NT - James Bible - NT - John Bible - NT - Jude Bible - NT - Luke Bible - NT - Mark Bible - NT - Matthew Bible - NT - Paul Bible - NT - Philippians Bible - NT - Revelation Bible - NT - Romans Bible - NT - Thessalonians Bible - NT - Timothy Bible - OT Bible - OT - Amos Bible - OT - Chronicles Bible - OT - Daniel Bible - OT - Deuteronomy Bible - OT - Ecclesiastes Bible - OT - Esther Bible - OT - Exodus Bible - OT - Ezekiel Bible - OT - Ezra-Nehemiah Bible - OT - Genesis Bible - OT - Habakkuk Bible - OT - Hosea Bible - OT - Isaiah Bible - OT - Jeremiah Bible - OT - Job Bible - OT - Joel Bible - OT - Jonah Bible - OT - Joshua Bible - OT - Judges Bible - OT - Kings Bible - OT - Lamentations Bible - OT - Leviticus Bible - OT - Malachi BIble - OT - Micah Bible - OT - Nehemiah Bible - OT - Numbers Bible - OT - Pentateuch Bible - OT - Proverbs Bible - OT - Psalms Bible - OT - Ruth Bible - OT - Samuel Bible - OT - Song of Songs Bible - OT - Torah Bible - OT - Zechariah Bible - OT - Zephaniah Biblical Law Biblicism Billy Graham biography Biology Biololgy Biotechnology Blasphemy Blindness Blog news Blogging Blogroll Bloomsbury Group Bob Dylan Body Body symbolism Boethius Boko Haram Bonhoeffer Book of Common Prayer Books Botany Boundary Brexit Britain British History British Politics Bruce Springsteen Buddhism Bureaucracy Burial Business C. S. Lewis C. S. Peirce Calendars Caliphate Calvin calvinism Camille Paglia Canon Capitalism Cappadocians Carl Schmitt Catholic Social Teaching Catholicism Catholicity Causation cemeteries Cervantes Charism Charismata Charity Charles Dickens Charles Hodge Charles Simeon Charles Taylor Charles Williams Chaucer Chermistry Chess Chesterton Chiasm children China Chinese Exclusion Act Chivalry Chopin Chretien de Troyes Christendom Christian Democracy Christian reconstruction Christianity in Britain Christianization Christmas Christology Chronology Church church and state Church architecture Church Calendar Church history Church of England Church Year Cicero Circumcision Cities City of God Civil Religion Civil Society Civil War Civility Classical Theism Classics Climate Change Clothing Coleridge Colloquy of Marburg Colonialism Color Comedy Comenius Commodity Communio Communism Community Comparative religions Computer Science Confederacy Confessionalization Conflict Congregations consciousness Consecration Conservatism Constantine Constitution consumerism Contra Faustum Conversion Coriolanus Cormac McCarthy Cosmology Cosmopolitanism Council of Trent Counter-culture Counter-insurgency Courage Courtly love Covenants Crafts Craftsmanship Cranach Creation Creativity Creator-creature Credit Crime Crime and Punishment Crisis Critical scholarship Criticism Cross Cubism Cultural theory Culture Culture War Dance Daniel Dennett Dante Darwin Dave Eggers David David Foster Wallace David Hume David Jones Deadly sins Death Debt Dechristianization Decolonization Deconstruction Defoe Deja vu Democracy Denis de Rougemont Denominationalism Derrida Descartes Developmental psychology Devils Diocletian Discipleship Disenchantment Disgust Diversion Diversity Divine energies Divine Impassibility Divine Simplicity Divine Warrior Doctrine dogma Dominion Donald Trump Dostoevsky Douglas Campbell Douglas Farrow Dreams Dualism Durkheim Dystopia E.M. Forster Early Christianity Early Modern Europe Easter Eastern Europe Eastern Orthodoxy Ecclesiology Ecclesiology Economics Economy Ecumenism Eden Edgar Allan Poe Edmund Spenser Education Egypt Election Elites Emergence Emma Emotion Empire England English History English Reformation Enlightenment Entertainment Entrepreneur environmentalism Envy Epic Epiphany Episcopals Epistemology Epistles Equality Erasmus Ernst Kantorowicz Eros Eschatology Eternity Ethics Eucharist Europe Evangelicalism Evangelicals and Catholics Together Events Evil Evolution Exile Face Fairie Queene Fairy Tales Faith family Family and Marriage Fantasy Farming Fashion Fasting Fatherhood Fear Femininity Feminism Fertility Fetishization Feud Feudalism Feuerbach Fiction Figs Film Finance Finland Fire Flag Flags Flannery O'Connor Flood myths Folly Food football Foreign Affairs Foreign Policy Foreknowledge Forgiveness Foucault Fracking France Francois Mauriac Franz Rosenzweig free will Freedom Freedom of God French Revolution Freud Funerals Future G. K. Chesterton Gambling Gaming Gay Marriage Gender gender identity Genealogy Geography George Berkeley George Eliot George Herbert; Poetry George Romanes Gerald Manley Hopkins Germany Gethsemane Gift Gifts Giorgio Agamben Global Christianity Global economics Globalism Globalization Glorious Revolution Gnosticism God's sovereignty Gods Goethe Golf Good Friday Gospel Gospels Gothic Gothic architecture Grace Grammar Gramsci Gratitude Greek Literature Greek Philosophy Greek Religion Greek Science Gregory of Nyssa Guillermo del Toro H. Richard Niebuhr Haiku hair Hamann Hamlet Handicap Handles Hands Hans Urs von Balthasar Happiness Harold Bloom Harper Lee Harvest healing Heaven Heavenly treasure Heavenly treasure Hebrew Bible Hebrew language Hegel Heidegger Hell Hellenism; Judaism; Revelation Henri de Lubac heresy Herman Dooyeweerd Hermeneutics Herod Heroic Heroism Hesiod Hidegard of Bingen Hierarchy Hieronymus Bosch Historicism Historiography History History - Early Modern History - Middle Ages Hoaxes Hobbes Holiness Holy Saturday Holy Spirit Home Homeless Homer Homosexuality Honor hope Horror Hospitality Housing Hugh of St. Victor Human Rights Humanism Humor hylomorphism Hymns Hypocrisy. Iago Iconoclasm Identity Ideology Idleness Idolatry Iliad Images Imagination Immigrant churches Immigrant Religion Immigration Imperialism Improvization Imputation Incarnation Incest India Individualism Indonesia Inequality Inerrancy Infant Baptism Infant mortality Infanticide Ingratitude Innovation Inspiration Institutions Insult Intellectual History Intellectuals Intelligent Design International Politics Internet Intimacy IQ Iran Iran-Iraq War Iraq Ireland Irony Islam Islamic State Islamism Ismail Kadare Israel Ivan Illich J. Gresham Machen J.N. Figgis Jacob Jacques Lacan James Bond James Jordan James Joyce James KA Smith James Wood Jane Austen Jane Jacobs Jealousy Jed Perl Jeff Koons Jeroboam Jesus Jewish War 66-70 AD Jihad Johann Georg Hamann Johannine Epistles John Ashbery John Behr John Bunyan John Calvin John Donne John Frame John Howard Yoder John Knox John Milbank John Milton John Owen John Rawls John Ruskin John Stuart Mill John the Baptist John Webster John Wesley John Williamson Nevin Jonathan Edwards Jorge Luis Borges Joseph Conrad Joseph Ratzinger Journalism Joy Judaism Judaize Judgment Judith Butler Jurgen Moltmann Justice Justification Kalevala Kant Karl Barth Karl Marx Karl Polanyi Karl Rahner Kazakhstan Kazuo Ishiguro Kenneth Lonergan Kierkegaard King Lear Kingdom of God Kitsch Knighthood Knowledge Korea Labor movement Lactantius Lamech Lament Landscape Language Latin America Laughter Law Law and Punishment Leftism Lent Les Murray Levi-Strauss Levites Leviticus Liber Mundi Liberal arts Liberal Theology Liberalism Light Lighthouse Linguistics LIstening Literacy Literary structure Literature Liturgics Liturgy Locke Logic Love Luther Lutheran Lutheranism Lying Lytton Strachey Macbeth Machiavelli Machines Madness Mainline Manhattan Manicheanism Manners Manufacturing Manuscripts Mao Zedong Maps Marcion Marilynne Robinson Marketing Marriage Martha Nussbaum Martin Bucer Martin Chemnitz Martyrdom Marx Marxism Mary Mary Douglas masculinity Mass Materialism Mathematics Maundy Thursday Max Weber Media Mediation Medication Medicine Medieval Church Medieval exegesis Medieval Literature Medieval theology Medieval Thought Medievalism Memory Merchant of Venice Mesopotamian Religion Messianic Metaphor Metaphysics Methodist Mexican-American War Michel de Montaigne Michel Faber Middle Ages Middle East Midwifery Mikhail Bulgakov Military Millennium Mind Miracles Miscellaneous Mission missionaries Mixed constitution Modern self modernism Modernity monasticism Monotheism Monroe Doctrine Monsters Montaigne's Essays Moral philosophy Mormonism Moses Mother Teresa Motherhood Motive Mount of Olives Movies Multiculturalism Murder Music Musicals Mutability Mutability Mystery Mysticism myth N. T. Wright Narrative Nation-State Nationalism Natural Law Natural-Supernatural Nature Nature and culture Nature and Grace Nazi Nazirite Necrophilia Nero Nestorianism Neuroscience Nevin Lectures New Atheism New Testament New York City Newbigin News NGOs Nibelungenlied Nicholas of Cusa Nicholas of Lyra Nietzsche Nigeria Nihilism Nobel Prize Nobility Nominalism Norbert Elias Norman MacCaig nostalgia Novels Numerology Obama Objectivity and subjectivity Occasionalism Odysseus Oil Old Testament Oliver O'Donovan Ontology Origen original sin Orthodoxy Othello Owen Barfield Pacifism Pactum salutis Paedocommunion Paganism Pain Painting Paleoconservatism Palm Sunday Pannenberg Parenting Pascal Passions Passivity Pastoral Care Pastoral theology Patrick Modiano Patristics Patronage Paul Peace of God Peace of Westphalia Penal substitution Pentecost Pentecostalism Perichoresis Pericles Persecution Person Peter Peter Enns Petrarch Philip K. Dick Philip Melanchthon Philosophy Philosophy of Action Philosophy of History Philosophy of language Philosophy of science Phone booth Photography Physics Pictures Pierre Bourdieu Place Planned Parenthood Plants plato Play Plot Plotinus Pluralism Pneumatology Poetics poetry Poetry & Stories Poland police Political Philosophy Political theology Political Theory Politics Pop Culture Pope Francis Popular Culture Populism Pornography Porphyry Post-Colonial Theory Post-Structuralism Postmodernism Postmodernity Potential Poverty Power Practice Pragmatism Prayer Preaching Predestination Prediction Prehistory Premillennialism Presbyterian Priesthood Prince Charles Prison Reform privacy Private Prodigal Son Progress Progressivism Property Prophecy Prophet Propitiation Prosperity gospel Prostitution Protectionism Protestantism Providence Prudentius psalms Pseudo-Dionysus Psychological Warfare Psychology Public intellectual Public Life Public Philosophy Public Theology Publishing Punk Rock Pure nature Puritanism Purity Pushkin Putin Pythagoreanism R.J. Rushdoony Race Racism Radical Orthodoxy Rape Rationality Reactionary reading Realism Reason Red State Blue State Reformation Reformational Catholicism Reformational Philosophy Reformed theology refugees reinhold niebuhr Relationality Relativism Relics Religion Religion and science Religions Religious Freedom Religious Liberty Religious Right Renaissance Rene Girard Republican Party Resurrection Resurrection. Revelation Revelations Revenge Revivalism Revolution rhetoric Richard Flannagan Richard II Richard III Richard Wagner Richard Wilbur Righteousness Ritual Robert Frost Robert Herrick Robert Jenson Robert Mugabe Robert Spaemann Robinson Crusoe Rock n' Roll Rod Dreher Rodin Roman Catholicism Roman Empire Roman Religion Romance Romanticism Rome Rootedness Rosenstock-Huessy Rousseau Rowan Williams Rural America Russia Russian literature Russian Orthodoxy Rusty Reno Rwanda S. Y. Agnon Sabbath Sacrament Sacramental theology Sacraments Sacred Sacred Space Sacrifice saints Salt Sam Harris Same-sex marriage Sanctuary Satan Satire Saudi Arabia Scapegoat Scarcity Schism Schleiermacher Scholarship Science Science and Theology Science Fiction Scopes trial Scotland Scott Adams Scott Cairns Scottish Reformation Scotus Scripture and tradition sculpture Sea Second temple Secularism Secularization Self-Help Self-trust Semiotics Semper reformanda separation of church and state Sermon on the Mount Sex Sex Trafficking Sexual abuse Sexual Politics Sexual Revolution Sexuality Shakespeare Shame Culture Shema Sherlock Shopping Silence Simone Weil Simplicity Simpsons Sin Sincerity Sixties Skepticism Slavery Slavoj Zizek Sleep Sloth Social capital Social change Social Imaginary Social Science Socialism Socialization Sociology Sociology of Knowledge Sociology of Religion Sola scriptura Sonnets Sophocles Soteriology Soviet Union Space Spain Speculation Spinoza Spirit Sport Sports Star Trek State State-formation Stephen Masty Steven Bannon Strangers Structuralism structure Subject-object Substitution Suburbs Suffering Suicide Super-Rich Superheroes Supersessionism Supplication Supreme Court Surveillance Symbol Synagogue Taberancle Tabernacle Tax Taxes Tears Technology Teens Teleology Television Temple Ten Commandments Terence Terrence Malick Terrorism Thanksgiving The South The West Theodore Roosevelt Theogony Theological Education Theological Language Theology Theology - Anthropology Theology - Christology Theology - Covenant Theology - Creation Theology - Ecclesiology Theology - Eschatology Theology - Liturgical Theology - Pneumatology Theology - Soteriology Theology - Trinity Theology proper Theopolis Theopolis Institute Theosis Theresa May Thomas A. Clark Thomas Aquinas Thomas Carlyle Thomas Mann Threshing Thucydides Time Tocqueville Tolerance Toleration Tolstoy Tom Wolfe Tools Torah Torture Toscanini Totalitarianism Trade Tradition Tragedy Transhumanism Translation Transubstantiation Travel Trees Trinitarianism Trinity Trinity House Tristan Troilus and Creysede Trump Trump Truth Turkey Twelfth Night Two Kingdoms Typology Ukraine Ulysses Uncanny Uncategorized Uniform Union with Christ United States Unity University Usury Utilitarianism Utopia Value Vatican II Vengeance Vico Victorian Age Victorian Literature Vienna Violence Virgil Virgin Birth Virginia Woolf Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Solovyev Vladimir Solovyov W.H. Auden Walls Walt Disney Walt Whitman Walter Benjamin Walter Lippmann War Wars of Religion Washington DC Wealth Weddings Will William Carlos Williams William Gilpin William Golding Wine Wisdom wonder Word of God Wordsworth Work Works World Council of Churches World History World War I World War II Worldview Worship Wrath Writing Youth Youth Ministry Yuja Wang Yves Congar Zimbabwe Zwingli Zygmunt Bauman

Select a Month January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003 September 2003 August 2003

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

What principle does "love covers a multitude of sins" teach?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Jealousy wins Pride is good Revenge is best Forgiveness and mercy