Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Thus says the Lord: “A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are no more” (Jer 31:15). The Night of the Hunter belongs on every Christian’s Christmas list. My family has even…
One important part of Jesus's birth narrative is the presence of angels. The angel Gabriel appeared to the Virgin Mary, announcing that she would bear a son. And then, on the night Jesus was born, a whole host of angels appeared to the shepherds. Angels are mysterious creatures to us.…
I was settled nicely into my chair and listening to the conversation in an undergrad religion seminar, my last required course to graduate. Though a few Christians sat scattered around the room, the course itself was dedicated to poking holes in traditional understandings of the Bible: our readings deconstructed notions…
God’s symbols belong to Him and to His people. They are constantly at work in the world, including the world of film, music, painting, architecture, and other artforms. You cannot escape God’s symbols or the meaning He has woven into the created order. Artists use and borrow God’s symbols, whether…
For centuries, Christians identified Israel in the Old Testament as a single, literal ethnic group, often called “the Jews.” Even supersessionists – those who believed the Church superseded Israel – assumed the clear-cut, technical definition of “Israel” in the Bible is the ethnic group. However, a deeper dive into Genesis,…
Misreading Intent In the opening verses of Matthew 11, the reader is confronted immediately by John the baptizer who has been imprisoned since 4:12. John poses a question to Jesus, inquiring from prison as to whether or not he is Israel’s awaited Messiah or if they should anticipate another: “Are…
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Jonathan Ree’s delightful I See A Voice glances at Enlightenment-era efforts to work out analogies between color and musical harmonies. Newton’s Optics was key. He argued that “just as all different tones can be located on a single scale running from the highest to the lowest pitch of audible sound,…
We don’t hear sounds, Heidegger said. That’s an abstraction. What we hear are things making sounds - “the creaking wagon, or the motor cycle . . . the column on the mark, the north wind, the woodpecker tapping, the fire crackling” (quoted in Jonathan Ree, I See A Voice ,…
Voice has often been seen as expression, as the coming into public space of something within. Given its reliance on breath, it was easy to conclude that voice is the expression of the soul. According to Ree ( I See A Voice ), it was Herder who broke through this…
Diane Thompson concludes her essay in Dostoevsky and the Christian Tradition with this superb description of the place of God’s Word in the words of Dostoevsky’s novels, and his characters: “Dostoevsky’s feeling for the dynamic aspect of the Logos was exceptionally strong, as was his gift for making it a…
Consciousness enters the world and the stones remain stones and the sun the sun. Still existence becomes completely different when consciousness arises, Bakhtin argues in Speech Genres . This happens become the coming of consciousness is the coming of “the witness and the judge” (137). “A stone is still stony…
Nabokov didn’t much like Dostoevsky. What interests him in literature is “enduring art and individual genius,” and from this viewpoint Dostoevsky is mediocre: “with flashes of excellent humor, but, alas, with wastelands of literary platitudes in between” ( Lectures on Russian Literature , 68). His characters are mentally unbalanced, his…
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