Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I believe hymnals should be shorter than they are. Much shorter. 100 hymns at most, let’s say. I imagine that this will be a hard one to swallow for most of my readers, so I will attempt to bolster my argument as best I can. I can’t think of any…
Joshua is never called a king in the Bible. Yet while lacking the title, Joshua possesses the trappings of biblical kingship to a degree that it seems warranted to consider him a royal figure. There are lots of reasons for thinking this. In a 1981 Journal of Biblical Literature article,…
God speaks. He is not silent. He has designed humanity for reception of such communication and also to speak on His behalf. This speaking is not simply happenstance. It is not just a curious quirk about humanity. It is intrinsic to who we are that we speak and shape the…
One evening, years ago, home from college for Christmas break, I dreamt that I was playing the piano, passionately and well, in the church sanctuary beneath the parsonage in the renovated mansion in rural New Hampshire where my father was the minister. It was something of a lucid dream because…
I’m a big worrier. Always have been. Some of my earliest memories are of being anxious to the point of getting sick, sometimes for trivial reasons. My mind moves a million miles a minute, wondering what will happen in 5 minutes, or tomorrow, or next week, or in ten years.…
“The sun had gone up on the earth when Lot came to Zoar. And the LORD rained on Sodom and on Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the LORD from heaven, and he devastated those cities and the whole valley and all those dwelling in the cities and the growth of…
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Drawing on the work of Oliver O'Donovan, Jamie Smith offers a critique of natural law as an adequate grounding for political theology. Positively, Smith argues that “he public task of the church is not just to remind the world of what it (allegedly) already knows (by ‘natural' reason), but to…
At the beginning of his Silence and Praise , Ryan Hansen summarizes several of the recent approaches to understanding the cosmology of the book of Revelation. The most popular today borrows from the sociology of knowledge to suggest that John's writing creates a “symbolic universe” or “worldview” for his readers.…
The emphasis on chastity, virginity, and lack of defilement from women does not have to do with misogyny or asceticism. In biblical perspective, it means that this is both a liturgical and a military assembly. When Israel arrived at Sinai, the men had to keep themselves from women so as…
In his Gift and the Unity of Being , Antonio Lopez claims that “Christ's kenotic gift of self restores unity with God. The redemption of the gift allows man to see that unity with God is possible and that it generates a whole that is greater than its parts. St.…
Douglas Rushkoff's Nothing Sacred is rather all over the place (as one might say if one had a thickly superior British accent). The Judaism he favors isn't a “traditional community with concrete values and well-defined rules” (1) but one that “stresses transparency, open-ended inquiry, assimilation of the foreign, and a…
Explaining the power of liturgical habit, Paul Griffiths ( Decreation ) offers writing as an example of the self-forgetful, and world-forgetful, character of habit. It's one of the best descriptions of the experience of writing that I have come across. A few preliminaries to make sense of the analysis: Griffiths…
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