Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Bruce Marshall once wrote that every young man who rings the bell at a brothel is unconsciously looking for God. While it is not necessarily true that the inward desire of every man is ultimately a thirst for righteousness, it is true that every sin is the disordering of a…
In a previous essay , I argued that the story which begins with Lot and culminates in Ruth’s great-grandson David follows God’s five-fold pattern of creative work as laid out by Jim Jordan: taking something in hand (in this case, the Abrahamic family), restructuring it, distributing the product of labor,…
Gilder, George. Men and Marriage. Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2023. 1 By 1973, the hightide of second-wave feminism had flooded the beaches of American culture. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique eroded the shores of traditional female roles by naming and stirring up further domestic discontentment. Kate Millet wrote her dissertation-turned-book,…
The Book of Job is a very tortuous book. The arguments of Job and his friends are shot through with truth and error hopelessly mixed together. Every line of contentious poetry stands locked in deadly battle with every other line. As maddening as this can be for a reader who…
More than once in the last 50 years it has occurred to me that Paul might have known Jesus before He appeared to Paul on the Damascus road, but I had never taken up the notion in earnest until recently when I ran into a book by Stanley Porter titled…
The question in the title is genuine, not polemic. I could be perfectly happy to follow an ancient — and what is regarded as a well-attested — tradition. But I do not feel compelled to follow it simply because it is tradition. I would like to have arguments that Peter…
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A passage from Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, Revised Edition pinpoints the internal tensions of liberal order. Nietzsche writes, “If there are to be institutions there must be a kind of will, instinct, imperative, anti-liberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, to authority,…
Descartes is accused of proposing that the human soul is a “ghost in the machine.” Does he think of the body mechanistically? It’s true that he speaks of “our body’s machine” that operates in large measure “unaided” ( The Passions of the Soul: An English Translation of Les Passions De…
Peter Leithart is one of the most creative and provocative theological writers today. He manages to combine sound critical scholarship with accessible writing and a flair for the dramatic. Who else would think of defending the Emperor Constantine against his legions of critics today? Leithart does so not just to…
Shapin again ( The Scientific Revolution (science.culture) , 72-73): He offers a fascinating description of the challenges of persuasion in early modern science. Galileo claimed that his telescope proved there were moons around Jupiter. Many of those who looked through his device didn’t see what he saw. Some refused to…
Debates among historians about the relative weight of “intellectual” and “social” factors seem “rather silly” to Steven Shapin. What’s needed, he argues in The Scientific Revolution (science.culture) is a sociology of scientific knowledge “to display knowledge making and knowledge holding as social processes” (p. 9). He thinks too that the…
My pastoral colleague, Toby Sumpter, has just come out with a wonderful commentary on Job, Job Through New Eyes: A Son for Glory . I am biased in favor of my friend, but I’m confident that even an unbiased reader will find a lot to like. Toby reads Job as…
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