Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
C. S. Lewis tackled what is perhaps the most difficult and oft-heard objection to the Christian God in his classic, The Problem of Pain. 1 “If God were good,” Lewis restates the problem, “He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty, He would be…
There is nothing incongruous about assuming that Jesus lamented over His people on three separate occasions and that on two of those occasions, He expressed Himself in almost identical language. Two lamentations are recorded in the Gospel of Luke and are clearly marked as distinct. They are also expressed in…
In the Anglican Church in North America, the question of women’s ordination to the priesthood continues to be discussed with each diocese left to decide its own practice. A recurring point of debate is how we are to understand the priest’s representative role in the liturgy. Emily McGowin, in a…
The Theopolis Institute recently added two new members to its Board of Directors, Josh Rollins and Sarah Moore. Josh has recently served as Senior Vice President of Corporate Development for MeTEOR Education, and was previously Chief Financial Officer at MeTEOR. He brings a wealth of finance experience, and will take…
Since moving to Englewood, Colorado, I have been blessed to be involved in the nuts-and-bolts practice of Church unity. The pastors here talk about the One Church in Englewood, and mean it. They love each other, pray fervently for each other, and long for the unity they enjoy to spread…
One day, the author Samuel Clemens cut himself shaving. He was an inveterate foul-mouth and on this occasion recited the entirety of his iniquitous vocabulary. When he was finished, his wife, hoping to shock him, repeated every word he said. Clemens responded, "You have the words, dear, but you don't…
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Jerrold Seigel suggests that Locke’s self has “three different aspects”: We are selves to others “by virtue of what they know about our mental and moral life”; we are “selves to ourselves, but incompletely so, through the imperfect consciousness we have of our lives and deeds in the here and…
Murphy goes into admiring detail describing Thomas’s theory of interior senses in higher animals. Apart from its purely historical interest and the anticipations of later scientific theories, Thomas’s discussion has philosophical and theological interest in its own right. He claims, for instance, that there are a number of interior senses…
Robert Young claims that the controversy over Darwinism in the 19th century was not so much a religion-v.-science controversy as a duel between competing theodicies. At one level, he argues, “the protagonists in the debate were in fundamental agreement. They were fighting over the best ways of rationalizing the same…
Murphy offers an amusing discussion of the question, Assuming a Cartesian dualism of mind and body, how can the mind cause a physical object like the body to move? If one assumes that physicists are correct that physical energy can be transferred to a physical system, it has to arise…
Murphy makes this interesting comment, which she admits is an oversimplification: “the adoption of a dualist anthropology in the early centuries of the church was largely responsible for changing Christians’ conception of what Christianity is basically all about. I am suggesting that original Christianity is better understood in socio-political terms…
In her Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies? (Cambridge, 2006), Nancey Murphy argues for a non-reductionist version of physicalism on the question of the “body-soul” problem: “This is the view that humans are composed of only one ‘part,’ a physical body.” She spends a bit over six pages near the…
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