Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
There are many legitimate reasons to lament the divided state of the church. Fleshly pride, theological hubris, sectarian rivalries are each in their own ways modern versions of the Galatian heresy, refusing table fellowship with brothers and sisters for whom Christ died. And denominations have frequently played the same role…
Though Bogumil Jarmulak was not able to deliver his lectures on Jurgen Moltmann due to flight delays, he preached at Trinity Presbyterian Church on Sunday morning, June 14. He encouraged the church in how to deal with misery in this life, and pointed them to their only hope in life…
Connecting with the past within the present is a complicated endeavor. One of the most immediate challenges facing us is that of ensuring that, as Christians, our use of the past is undertaken in service of present faithfulness. The past is not a realm to which we retreat, but a…
Dear friend of Theopolis, Before he attended the Theopolis course on Holistic Mission during Easter term, 2014, Jonathan Sedlak lived with his family in the quiet, comfortable Milwaukee suburb of Slinger, Wisconsin. An intensive week in Birmingham changed all that. Listening to missionary Wes Baker and hashing over readings and…
“What is in the nature of these materials?” The Bauhaus, founded in Germany in 1919 by architect Walter Gropius, had a profound influence in every area of design, from graphics and typography to clothing, furniture and architecture. The institution was not so much a style as a method, its philosophy…
Russell Richey's Denominationalism collects some of the most important essays on its titled topic. The authors are a who's-who of 20th century American religious history: Winthrop Hudson, Timothy L. Smith, Sidney Mead, Richey himself, H. Richard Niebuhr and Martin Marty. Some are broad synthetic studies; others are more granular studies…
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John’s gospel is a contentious courtroom of a gospel. Legal language dominates the whole gospel - witnesses are called, Jesus promises an advocate, the Jews are constantly trying to put Jesus in the dock. But the whole gospel is really the trial of the Jews, just as what appears to…
Homer’s prologue to the Odyssey delays the identification of the hero until the end of the prologue, a literary sign that this hero comes hidden, disguised, in craft. That, of course, is precisely how Odysseus behaves throughout the epic. John’s gospel begins with similar techniques. We learn about the Word…
Shakespeare’s Coriolanus can be read as dramatizing the Augustinian perspective most recently articulated by Oliver O’Donovan, namely, that “within every political society there occurs, implicitly, an act of worship of divine rule.” Through his dramatization of Roman society, Shakespeare points to another act of worship that constitutes a different sort…
JL Austin famously distinguished between “performative” and “constative” utterances, the former of which perform the action to which they refer and the latter of which make assertions that can be judged as true or false. Modern philosophy has treated the constative as the norm, and performatives, if considered at all,…
How did the linguistic theory of Saussure become a model for anthropologists, sociologists, and analysts of pop culture? Jonathan Culler suggests that this move rests on “two fundamental insights: first, that social and cultural phenomena are not simply material objects or events but objects or events iwth meaning, and hence…
Foucault, in Canguilhem’s summary, argues that an anthropologization of the sciences took place in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, when Kantian philosophy combined with biology, economics, and linguistics to raise the question What is Man? Foucault argues: “From the moment when life, work, and language ceased to be…
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