Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto Me. In 2005, God blessed our family with our third child, our second daughter, whom we named Bethany. As soon as Bethany was born, we knew there was something different about her. Unlike her two older siblings, who were born…
Christian, what is it that we believe? While Creeds like the Nicene and Apostle’s have been fundamental pieces of Christian liturgy and life, the American Church is highly unattached to these classic statements. From this creedal phobia has arisen the popular “No Creed, but Christ” slogan. Such slogan, of course,…
Revisiting William Cavanaugh’s devastating 2009 The Myth of Religious Violence . The myth of Cavanaugh’s title is a well-known one. According to the myth, religion is a distinct sphere of human life and practice from the rest of human social life, a universal impulse in human beings, and is dogmatic,…
19 Then the same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews, came Jesus and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you. 20 And when he had so…
An octave is a repetition, a repetition with a difference. It’s not the first note played again , but the first note played at a higher pitch. Octaves have always marked new beginnings. Hebrew boys were circumcised on the eighth day. Firstborn sheep were dedicated to Yahweh on the eighth…
We say Jesus’ resurrection is good news. It wasn’t good news for the disciples on the first Easter. More like perplexing, bewildering news. For others, it wasn’t perplexing, and it certainly wasn’t good. It was plain old bad news. Early in Luke’s gospel, Herod is terrified that Jesus might be…
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Solomon’s prayer at the temple dedication (1 Kings 8) is a prayer about prayer. It’s a prayer that future prayers will be heard. His petitions take the form: “When Israel suffers from X, and turns to You in Your house, deliver them from X.” Solomon’s petitions for future petitions repeatedly…
A malar of Metz’s On the Liturgy , recently published in a handsome two-volume Latin-English edition in the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, represents the kind of “mysteriological” piety against which modern liturgical scholars like Bouyer and Schmemann fulminated. For Amalar, every moment and movement of the liturgy symbolizes some event…
In a NYRB review of Justin Steinberg’s Dante and the Limits of Law , Robert Pogue Harrison pinpoints why the Comedy is so disquieting. Steinberg’s book shows how thoroughly the Comedy is indebted to medieval conceptions of law and punishment, and thus how much Dante’s poem is an effort to…
Dave Eggers’s latest novel takes its lengthy title from the prophet Zechariah: Your Fathers, where are they? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? The novel is inverted Kafka, as if K. had been able to tie down his interrogators and depose them. Thomas, a disturbed and disappointed young man,…
As Carlos Eire has documents ( War Against the Idols ), some Reformation iconoclasts were motivated by a spiritualizing piety that denied that God could be encountered in material things. Some, but not all. Some opposed images for precisely the opposite reasons. There is something of the spiritualizing tendency in…
Hosea 2 offers a lovely evocation of a new exodus and new covenant. After Yahweh threatens to destroy Israel’s vines and fig trees because she has prostituted herself with the Baal’s (2:9-13), He promises to lure her into the wilderness, take her to the vineyards where she will sing the…
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