Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Creationism is debated widely in the US, especially when it comes to teaching creation as an alternative theory of origins in public schools. Every few months, there’s another poll showing that many Americans still believe Ussher’s claim that the world was created around 4000 BC, which always elicits a contemptuous…
Walker Percy died in 1990, but his six published novels and his collections of essays are more relevant than when he wrote them. Percy was an American Dostoevsky, and that was no accident. “The European novels,” he says in a 1974 interview, “are more philosophical, more novels of ideas.” Dostoevsky,…
The Spirit is God’s agent for renewing the creation, for restoring bonds between nations, for knitting together people into the body of Christ. The Spirit is the renewer of the world, and the bond of all relations. That means that if you want your family to be knit together, if…
In their basic physical sense , the verbs translated as "persecute" in the Bible mean “chase” or “pursue,” and that fits the context quite naturally. As Pharaoh “pursued” (LXX, dioko ; Heb. radaph ) Israel into the wilderness, for example, so the dragon chases the woman back to her place…
Seng-Kong Tan’s Fullness Received and Returned is a densely argued, thoroughly researched, contextually sensitive study of participation in the soteriology of Jonathan Edwards. Along the way, Tan deals with many of the central themes in Edwards’s theology. As with many recent studies of Edwards, Tan’s monograph demonstrates both Edwards’s creativity…
The title of James Joyce’s first novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man indicates that it is a bildungsroman , a story of formation that describes the formative experiences of a poet who aspires to artistic greatness. The education described is Joyce’s own. The novel recounts the failing…
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W hen New Haven's New Burying Ground was set up in the 1790s, it marked a revolution in cemetery planning. It was outside of town, neatly organized into family plots and class clusters. Yale President Timothy Dwight thought it unique in the world, and gave a rationale for its design:…
I n his book on Hands , Darian Leader notes the “paradox at the heart of the modern notions of agency and choice.” We strive for autonomy and self-determination, but this “obligation to be free and to make our own choices is framed within a network of imperatives that come…
C ontemporary technologies threaten to suck us into virtual reality, and in response many have turned to real reality, to hand-crafts that link us to this worldly stuff. As Darian Leader ( Hands , 13-13) puts it, “We are encouraged to counter our apparent alienation in the excesses of the…
I n his book on The Gospel Commission , Michael Horton includes several insightful pages on baptism. “Like circumcision,” he writes, “baptism is represented in the New testament as God's decision and claim on us. Although it obligates us to respond in faith and obedience, baptism is God's sign and…
F ollowing Henri de Lubac's studies in medieval Eucharistic theology, Ernst Kantorowicz traces the development of a sacralized-secular politics in the later medieval period, as ecclesiological principles were applied to national politics. Lucas de Penna drew a direct line from the church as mystical body to the political body: “The…
I don't recall if I ever met Stephen Masty but I had heard his name for many years. My brother and brother-in-law were at school with him at Hillsdale College, but until I read his obituary in the Hillsdale alumni magazine recently I hadn't conceived of what a big life…
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