The best ideas are common property
We are all shaped by our parents’ heritage. When one is descended from immigrants, the cultural heritage is often complex. This heritage, and the degree to which it is lost or maintained over time, is one of the more intriguing features of postcolonial societies such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States. My …
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Growing up in the same fundamental religious denomination as novelist Ken Follett and poet Patricia Beer, I was taught from earliest days that nothing good could come from the Catholic Church. My paternal grandmother, for example, a superb mimic, would occasionally regale us at the Christmas dinner table at Wahroonga with humorous anti-papist rhetoric. On one occasion, in …
Robert Musil is one of the least widely read of the great European modernist writers, yet his work occupies a distinctive place in twentieth-century intellectual culture. His fiction is neither conventionally religious nor militantly anti-religious. It explores the spiritual exhaustion of modern civilisation, the collapse of moral certainty, and the persistent human longing for transcendence …
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The Marrow Controversy and the “Marrow Men” are frequently confused with the theological work The Marrow of Theology, but the two are historically and conceptually distinct, despite sharing the word “marrow” in their titles. The confusion is understandable because both emerged from the broader Reformed and Puritan world and both sought to articulate the essential substance …
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The Marrow Controversy was one of the most significant theological disputes in eighteenth-century Scottish Presbyterianism. Although it emerged within a specific ecclesial and historical setting, its underlying questions remain deeply relevant: What is the relationship between grace and obedience? How should the gospel be preached? Can assurance of salvation coexist with serious holiness? And what …
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