The Council of Chalcedon was convened in A.D. 451 in order to combat the heresy of Monophysitism. While Nestorianism – condemned at the previous Council of Ephesus twenty years prior and historically attributed to Nestorius – held that Christ is…
Political Polarization at the Dawn of the Spanish Civil War
In his monograph on the Spanish Civil War, Stanley Payne dedicates a chapter to what he calls “the breakdown of democracy”, wherein he narrates the unravelling of the Spanish Second Republic. In it, he includes a number of citations from…
Crusading Ideology and the Spanish Civil War: The Persistence of an Idea
In Guillermo del Toro’s 2006 film Pan’s Labyrinth set in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, there is a scene where a man who has been detained by the military for hunting rabbits in the woods and his adult…
Rome, Babylon, and 1 Peter 5:13
In wrapping up his First Epistle, the Apostle Peter makes a cryptic reference to his location, stating that, “The church that is in Babylon, elected together with you, saluteth you: and so doth my son Mark.”[1] The “Mark” referenced here…
Reconquest, Crusade, and the “Llibre dels Fets”
In his broad survey of the crusading movement, Jonathan Riley-Smith paid homage to the Iberian monarchs James I of Aragon and Fernando III of Castile, referencing their military success in the thirteenth-century as well as the fact that “this extraordinary…
Some Musings on Papal Infallibility
In his work Innocent III and the Crown of Aragon: The Limits of Papal Authority, Damian Smith shares the words that Giovanni Capocci is supposed to have said to that Pope: ‘Your words are God’s words, but your works are…
Did St. Thomas Aquinas Believe that the Virgin Mary was a Sinner?
I recently came across an article entitled, What is the difference between Mariology and Mariolatry?, attributed to the late Reformed Theologian, R.C. Sproul.[1] In it, the author says the following: “Thomas [Aquinas] saw that Mary’s Son was also Mary’s Savior…
Book Review: Church in the Wild
Grainger, Brett Malcolm. Church in the Wild: Evangelicals in Antebellum America. Harvard University Press. Cambridge, 2019. Reviewed by: Nicholas Gulda Church in the Wild: Evangelicals in Antebellum America seeks to revise the historical record regarding the attitude towards nature taken…
Sahih Muslim and the Immaculate Conception
This past summer, I was reading Jessica Coope’s monograph on the Martyrs of Córdoba. While discussing the religious climate in the ninth-century capital of al-Andalus, she says the following: “…[B]y the ninth century a hadith was generally accepted which states…
Visigoth Identity in the Trastámara Dynasty
[Note: This post is derived from a term paper that I was assigned in a class on Islamic Spain, where I was tasked with writing a quasi pre-thesis prospectus on topics that I might want to pursue as a Master’s…