Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Why there is more to Jephthah than meets than eye It was not that long ago that I realized the Jephthah-story and the Jesus-story were basically the same story. Sounds crazy, I know. But here is a one-paragraph synopsis of both: The people of God have gone their own way,…
G.K. Chesterton famously said that the Gospels don’t reveal Jesus’ mirth. It’s true we never catch Jesus laughing. But can we believe He never did? I don’t think so. Laughter is human, and Jesus was fully human. Jesus promised that those who mourned would laugh. He mourned; would He not…
Matthew 2 has all the elements of an exodus story. There’s a murderous king, who slaughters Jewish babies. There’s a infant who will be Israel’s future deliverer, saved from the murderous king so He can later return to save His people and lead them to the Promised land. There’s an…
The calendar of Israel was primarily theological, centered on commemorating the salvific acts of God, but also agricultural, celebrating the creation-restoring effects of those salvific acts. The feasts of the first month celebrated the reviving of the world in the Spring, and typified the cutting off of the Savior in…
The chiastic shape corresponds to the shape of human life. This should not surprise us, because we are made in the image of God, and God is manifest in Word and Spirit. If we are living epistles, our lives will look a bit like the literary shape of the books…
Back in January, Venkatesh Rao wrote a fascinating post on the Ribbonfarm blog, discussing different forms of models of narrative. Engaging with Ursula LeGuin’s talk ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ , Rao explores her contrast between the (male) ‘hero narrative’ and the (female) ‘carrier-bag story’, and suggests a third…
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Natural law arguments often conclude that every human being can know, without the help of revelation, that there is some deity, an ultimate reality, an absolute. Paul says that human beings know “about God” from creation, but also that they “knew God ” (Romans 1:19, 21)—that is, from creation they…
My latest First Things column sparked some reflections on apocalyptic politics from the Economist’s Erasmus columnist. He moves my observations about apocalyptic philosophy to apocalyptic politics. It comes up in all sorts of places. “Iran’s former president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, seemed obsessed with eschatology to a degree that irritated the country’s…
Roger Cohen is tired of Twitter bashers: “It’s not easy, being of a certain generation, to avoid the dinner conversation that veers into a lament about the short attention spans, constant device distraction, sad superficiality and online exhibitionism of a younger generation geared to life in 140 characters or less.…
“Work is charismatic,” writes Craig Keen in After Crucifixion (80-1). Keen elaborates in a beautiful passage: “What we are given to work upon precedes us, a gift sent our way the first five days of creation, the days when the Spirit hovered over the face of the waters, before our…
Progress, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy points out ( Christian Future ), was originally a plural term. “ Les progres ” was Condorcet’s phrase. What he had in mind were improvements, new gadgets and machines and gizmos. The singular form of the term came from early Christianity and referred to the spiritual improvement…
Sciences today often occupy ruts, separated from each other, each as incomprehensible to non-specialists as languages were at the tower of Babel, and separated too from the larger currents of culture. But it is a myth, Rosenstock-Huessy says ( Christian Future ), to believe that “sciences can advance without regard…
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