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 Even supersessionists – those who believed the Church superseded Israel – assumed the clear-cut, technical definition of “Israel” in the Bible is the ethnic group.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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Milbank makes a couple of interesting points regarding the import of an Augustinian view of evil. 1) Augustine’s view assumes the goodness of matter, in fact the goodness of all being. This, Milbank claims, seems to excuse evil - it’s some lack, a weakness or finitude, that makes for evil.…
In the view of many, the Holocaust belied the Augustinian description of evil as the privation of good. Something much more insidiously positive was at work in the death camps. Hannah Arendt, however, seems to confirm the Augustinian perspective in her treatment of the banality of evil. According to Milbank,…
Kant bristles at the demand that he claims to hear “on all sides”: ” Don’t argue !” Officers tell us to obey, tax-officials to pay, clergy to pray in a certain way. But Kant wants to argue. Or does he? Maybe not: “in some affairs which affect the interests of…
Kant’s appeal in “What Is Enlightenment?” is not primarily intellectual but ethical. Enlightenment, Kant says, “is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.” Immaturity he defines as “the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another,” and this immaturity is “self-incurred” when the cause is “lack of resolution…
David Gelernter, Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion . New York: Doubleday, 2007. 229 pp. Hardback, $24.95. America, G. K. Chesterton said, is a nation with the soul of a church. David Gelernter, the polymathic computer scientist from Yale, suggests that this doesn’t quite go far enough. For many, both…
Wiker and Witt suggest that God created pandas as “comic relief” in a blessed fit of “divine whimsy.” The suggestion is troubling even for Christians who defend creation, because, being engineers, they have swallowed the reductive notion that creation must be functional. Wiker and Witt offer this rejoinder: “To spurn…
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