Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Stalker is a Soviet-era film by Andrei Tarkovsky in which an enigmatic location comes into existence either through an alien crash or a nuclear disaster; the film never makes it clear, but knowing Tarkovsky’s criticism of the spectacle nature of the alien motif after his own filming of Solaris and…
I was scrolling through Instagram on the night of Thanksgiving, the only one awake (as usual), coming down from my extrovert-high after all the conversation and merriment of the day, when I came across a post that stopped me in my tracks. The post contained a picture-perfect image of some…
The Theopolis Institute is pleased to announce the fourth round of the James B. Jordan Prize to honor outstanding doctoral dissertations in biblical theology. James Jordan is one of the most insightful biblical scholars of our time. The Jordan Prize exists to encourage more of the deep Scriptural investigation of…
Suppose I were to write three versions of a story. In every version, the first half of the book looks forward to the coming of the king. There are promises about him and about how glorious his kingdom will be, about how his kingdom will fill the earth with peace…
Introduction Doug Wilson’s American Milk and Honey is now available. There’s a great deal in the book worth commenting on, and I anticipate engaging with that material more broadly in the near future. In the lead up to its release, however, Moscow has not been silent concerning Israel, the Jews,…
Our telling of the Prodigal Son parable usually (and rightly) focuses on the runaway younger brother: the lost son returns, and his father joyfully and graciously receives him. But the full story has an additional element: an angry older brother. Jesus uses the older brother to rebuke the religious leaders…
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Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process traces modern standards of disgust and cleanliness to the development of court society during the Renaissance. Drawing on Elias, William Miller ( Anatomy of Disgust ) suggests sensitivity to disgust and being civilized are directly proportional. Martha Nussbaum ( Hiding from Humanity , 115-6) disagrees…
In his brilliant Earthly Powers (3), Michael Burleigh cites a passage from Tocqueville’s book on the French Revolution. Taking a note from Schiller about “how early modern religious wars spilled across political boundaries, which reminded Tocqueville of the ideological struggle between Jacobins and counter-revolutionaries in late-eighteenth-century Europe,” Tocqueville drew a…
Semyon Frank was a Russian emigre to London. Michael Burleigh ( Sacred Causes , 39) sums up his life: “Born in 1877 into a Russian-Jewish family, he had quickly outgrown a juvenile Marxism, converting to Orthodox Christianity in 1912, on the ground that the Jewish God was as remote from…
Our secular age can be sustained only if the secular has been carefully distinguished from the sacred, and only if the boundary between the two is vigorously, not to say violently, guarded. But boundary-drawing between the sacred and profane is the work of a priest. It is the sacred act…
Hugh Grady opens his Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics (6-10) with a brief and illuminating discussion of Kant’s aesthetics of purity. By “pure” here is meant the freedom of aesthetic experience from cognitive reason and teleological judgments, from practical or moral interests. This disinterested experience of art is an encounter with…
Jonathan Klawans is a great one for cutting through nonsense. In his Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple , he points to the oddity that “documents composed three, four, or even five centuries after the destruction are labeled as delayed responses to the destruction. . . the suggestion that it took…
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