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2025-02-07T15:18:50-05:00

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.

Reclaiming Natural Law in the Second Trump Era

Last updated on: February 7, 2025 at 3:18 pm By Edwin Woodruff Tait

Natural Law in the Second Trump Era In recent years I’ve run into a lot of people, including Catholics, who are suspicious of the concept of “natural law.” They associate it with a kind of conservatism which they believe is dehumanizing and legalistic. The first issue most people associate with the concept these days is sexuality, and they associate natural law with “proper function” arguments against same-sex relationships as “unnatural.” Politically, many people these days identify natural law with the... Read more

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2024-12-15T22:00:58-05:00

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.

Tradition as Disruption: Tradition and Apocalypse, Part IV

Last updated on: December 15, 2024 at 10:00 pm By Edwin Woodruff Tait

This past summer I began a series of posts reviewing David Bentley Hart’s book Tradition and Apocalypse. In the first post I discussed the general theological and historical issues Hart is addressing. In particular, I gave my own account of the development of early Christian tradition, particularly the doctrine of the Trinity, which is Hart’s major “test case.” In the second post, I discussed how the Reformation (my own area of expertise) fits into the picture, and the different ways in which... Read more

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2025-09-13T21:47:27-05:00

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.

The Witch’s Baptism: Wicked as a Catholic novel

Last updated on: September 13, 2025 at 9:47 pm By Edwin Woodruff Tait

A Good Witch Is hard to Find In college, I was assigned Flannery O’Connor’s story “A Good Man Is hard to Find.” I was disdainful of modern literature at that time and initially reacted badly to this dark tale of banality and murder. I saw it as typical modern secular nihilism. (Yes, I was very obnoxious.) But one of my professors happened to be a Flannery O’Connor scholar, and with his help I came to see that O’Connor was after... Read more

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2024-06-30T22:47:27-05:00

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.

The Disruption of Development: The Problem with Newman

Last updated on: June 30, 2024 at 10:47 pm By Edwin Woodruff Tait

In the past two posts, I’ve outlined the historical background to the arguments made by David Bentley Hart in his book Tradition and Apocalypse. Hart’s starting point is the evidence of diversity and disruption found in Christian tradition from the beginning. It’s simply not true that there’s an unbroken, unchanging stream of tradition linking modern Christians to the time of Jesus and the Apostles. Rather, Christian tradition is full of conflict and innovation. Ideas central to orthodoxy, such as the Trinity, were... Read more

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2024-06-25T09:04:20-05:00

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.

Gertrude and Claudius

Last updated on: June 25, 2024 at 9:04 am By Edwin Woodruff Tait

I just finished reading John Updike’s novel Gertrude and Claudius. I had never read an Updike novel before. I knew he was famous for novels about the torrid sexual lives of 20th-century middle-class Americans. So here’s a novel about the torrid sexual lives of upper-class medieval Danish people. It also happens to be a prequel to Hamlet. I found the beginning of the novel a bit off-putting–the style seemed stilted and awkward and the analysis of everyone’s motivations and thoughts... Read more

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2024-06-17T14:02:18-05:00

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.

The Development of Tradition: the background to Newman

Last updated on: June 17, 2024 at 2:02 pm By Edwin Woodruff Tait

In Part 1 of this review, I discussed the background for David Bentley Hart’s arguments in Tradition and Apocalypse, focusing on the issues he raises concerning the diversity of early Christianity and the discontinuity of fourth-century Trinitarian orthodoxy with much that had gone before. In this post, I’m going to continue the story by looking at the work of John Henry Newman. I’d intended to discuss Hart’s critique of Newman but my interest in the broader issues surrounding Newman caused this post... Read more

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2024-06-06T21:39:04-05:00

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.

Disruptions of Tradition: Tradition and Apocalypse, Part I

Last updated on: June 6, 2024 at 9:39 pm By Edwin Woodruff Tait

What is tradition? David Bentley Hart has a habit of saying things that I have already begun to think. But he says them much better and with much more profundity and coherence. Sometimes, to be sure, he puts ideas in my head that weren’t there before. More often, though, he confirms my intuitions and helps me work out their implications in a more systematic way. That’s definitely the case for the book of his I’ve read most recently, Tradition and Apocalypse. I’ve... Read more

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2024-05-05T23:08:05-05:00

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.

Not One Dead Remains in the Grave: Easter and Universalism

Last updated on: May 5, 2024 at 11:08 pm By Edwin Woodruff Tait

This Easter season I’ve been thinking about the message of the Resurrection in light of my recent reading of David Bentley Hart’s That All Shall Be Saved. This pugnaciously beautiful book has challenged my longstanding “hopeful universalism.” Hart claims that the kind of hope for universal salvation championed by Hans Urs von Balthasar is a weak compromise. Rather, he believes that Christians should affirm confidently that Jesus will save everyone. Anything less, Hart thinks, makes Christian theology incoherent and even immoral.... Read more

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2024-01-21T22:58:00-05:00

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.

Open Theism, Free Will, and Catholicism

Last updated on: January 21, 2024 at 10:58 pm By Edwin Woodruff Tait

My Patheos colleague David Schloss has just published a post on the evangelical theological movement known as open theism. I welcome this because I want to see Catholics engage more deeply with the theological discussions going on among Protestants. Also, my own encounter with open theism was tied up with my journey to Catholicism in several ways. The robot box First of all, I first encountered open theism in a Catholic context. (At least this is one of the... Read more

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2023-12-31T15:36:16-05:00

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.

Persons, not Individuals: The Legacy of Pope Benedict

Last updated on: December 31, 2023 at 3:36 pm By Edwin Woodruff Tait

Remembering Benedict a year after his death The death of Pope Benedict XVI a year ago prompted a wide range of responses, reflecting his decidedly mixed legacy and reputation. I began writing my own reflections but never finished or published them. The one-year anniversary of his death seemed like a good time to revisit that unfinished post, so that’s what I’ve done here. And while I won’t be directly addressing Fiducia Supplicans, I’m well aware that I’m talking about... Read more

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