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In our three-year lectionary cycle, most Hebrew Bible texts come up once at most. Isaiah 58 is assigned five times. We justice-minded Christians tend to find additional reasons to turn to it as well.

David Bentley Hart does not get out of bed in the morning to take on small projects. In his most recent volume (which is, as usual, mischievously polemical, dauntingly erudite, and verbose), he sets his sights on John Henry Newman’s conception of tradition as expressed in his landmark work, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845, revised 1878), the publication of which precipitated the Victorian scholar’s conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism and arguably now serves as a major pillar of the Catholic Church’s self-understanding.

Both his strengths and his failings are distinctly Catholic.

How missionary work can create the conditions for child abuse to thrive unchecked

My church offered college students weekly fellowship.
It turns out they needed the food, too.

One alarming aspect of the onetime revolutionary leader’s authoritarian turn has been the persecution of religious leaders.

River baptisms are becoming a casualty of polluted waters.