Genesis

CS Lewis’ Mere Christianity: Reflections on Intimacy, Romance, Marriage, and Divorce
CS Lewis

CS Lewis’ Mere Christianity: Intimacy, Romance, Marriage, and Divorce

05/31/2024 Bruce Strom 1

CS Lewis continues: “Being in love is a good thing, but it is not the best thing.” “You cannot make it the basis of a whole life. It is a noble feeling, but it is still a feeling.” But CS Lewis warns us that the initial excitement will not last, that “love in the second sense is not merely a feeling, but is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit, reinforced in Christian marriages by the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God.” […]

Summary of St Augustine’s Confessions of Faith and Repentance
Morality

Summary of St Augustine’s Confessions of Faith and Repentance

07/21/2023 Bruce Strom 4

The Confessions are both a testimonial and a prayer. St Augustine tells us how he embraced Christianity after he was active in the Manichean sect, a New Age dualistic system where good and evil competed more or less evenly, and where Jesus was totally divine without a trace of mortality. St Augustine had many of the same questions that we hear atheists and agnostics raise today, such as: How can intelligent and sophisticated men believe in superstitions about an Almighty God? How can God be Almighty when sin has such a hold in the world? What is the nature of evil? […]

Confessions Genesis Books 11 - 13
Morality

St Augustine’s Confessions, Creation in Genesis, Manicheism, and Pagan Myths, Books 11 Through 13

06/16/2023 Bruce Strom 2

How can the light shine in our lives? St Augustine prays, “since your Spirit moved over the waters, your mercy did not abandon us in our misery. You said, ‘Let there be light.’ You also said, ‘Repent; for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ You told us to repent. You commanded light to be made.” So, to St Augustine, repentance is light. […]

Hesiod Works and Days
Philosophy

Hesiod: Works and Days, Early Greek Moral Philosophy

03/10/2023 Bruce Strom 2

Hesiod is a grouchy old farmer who mistrusts ‘lords’” but does not advocate changing the society. “He believes in justice, honesty, conventional piety, self-reliance, self-denial, foresight, and above all, WORK. He dislikes city folk, the sea, women, gossip and LAZINESS. He delivers a maxim like ‘Don’t urinate where the Sun can see you’ with the same earnest convict that he advises judges not to take bribes, his brother to avoid pride, and the farmer to get two nine-year-old oxen and a forty-year-old hired hand. […]

Book Reviews and Miscellaneous

Book Reviews, Commentaries of Torah and Talmud, Medieval Rabbis and Modern Rabbis and Scholars

03/14/2022 Bruce Strom 1

We encourage Christians to study the moral lessons of the Torah, we do not hold to the dual-covenant belief that the laws in the Torah have been superseded. St Irenaeus in his influential work, On Heresies, teaches us that the moral laws of the Torah are still binding on Christians, and that the dietary and festival laws that have been superseded can be read as teaching moral lessons allegorically. […]