Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I've pastored a very rural church for well over a decade. Our town has about 1,000 people and will never grow until Jesus returns. 38 people attend our worship on Sundays. Here's a quick list of what we’ve done to grow our church, and what I’ve done to survive pastorally.…
Thanks for sharing so honestly about your current crisis of creativity. I totally understand and relate to that; it’s happened many times in my musical life thus far, and I’ve begun to accept it as a normal rhythm of the creative process. I actually went through a serious dry spell…
The Broken Stones of Israel At Sinai, the tablets of the Law of Moses were broken and restored. The Old Testament is a history of “new covenants,” including that promised in Jeremiah and fulfilled in Zechariah. Ultimately, the vertical Oath and the horizontal Sanctions met in the death of Jesus…
Woe to the sinful nation. Woe to those who enlarge their estates and build their portfolios. Woe to the drunks. Woe to those who call evil good and good evil. Woe to the proud who are wise in their own eyes. Woe to Congressmen who pass unjust laws and to…
The interpretation of Romans 7:7-25 is notoriously difficult. Good scholars disagree on many aspects of the passage, but the central interpretative difficulty concerns the identity of the “I.” Is Paul referring to himself? Is Paul referring to himself pre- or post-conversion? Does the “I” refer to Adam? Is the “I”…
You board the Metra train at Arlington Heights station one afternoon, heading to downtown Chicago for some sight-seeing. As the train departs from the station, a man in jeans, a striped t-shirt, and a Kansas City Royals baseball cap enters your train car, and begins asking to see each passenger’s…
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Choon-Leong Seow has some helpful comments about the “time for this, time for that” poem in Ecclesiastes 3. He points out that the thrust of the section is about God’s control of times and portions. As evidence, he notes that the word “season” us normally used “of predetermined or appointed…
In his early work on Husserl’s treatise on the origins of geometry, Derrida highlights the critical insight that the objectivity and universality of geometric axioms depends, paradoxically, on their embodiment in writing. On the one hand, geometry is “there for ‘everyone.’” Yet, “how does geometrical ideality (just like that of…
Postmodernism, as I’ve indicated in previous posts, is many things, some of which are quite inimical to Christian faith. But in important respects, postmodernism - especially the thought of Derrida - is a Hebraic protest against Hellenized philosophy. In his fine recent book on Derrida, James KA Smith suggests that…
Bauman suggests that postmodernity, which is the “age of contingency fur sich,” is also the age of community. Yet, the communities that are possible within postmodern culture are inherently unstable; they are “clouds of communities”: “Such communities will never be anything like Tonnies’s cosy and unreflective (cosy because unreflective) homes…
The arguments in favor of skepticism were summarized by Aenesidemus in the first century B.C. in his Pyrrhonian Principles . Aenesidemus brought together the arguments under “ten modes” or “ten tropes,” helpfully summarized at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism-ancient/#LPA as they were stated by Sextus Empricus. The ten modes are reproduced below. (Mates refers…
Reflecting further on the pastoral applications of Solomon’s phrase “shepherding wind”: Every believer is born of the Spirit, and blows where he wills, and a pastor is in the business of shepherding wind. In this context, “quenching the Spirit” might refer to poor shepherding that tries to suppress the wind.…
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