Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
One reason readers assume Paul is trying to prove that all human beings are sinful is that they understand him to be arguing that no one can keep the law. That means, they think, his opponents must believe that human nature is potentially sinless. Taking Paul’s statement that, if you…
[Note: This post was written prior to our name changing to Theopolis Institute.] What is Trinity House for? Three things: We aim to advance the reformation of the church and, through the church, to promote the renewal of culture; in furthering reformation, we aspire to be a site of fraternal,…
This is the third in a series of studies of the Third Word, and especially of Deuteronomy 14. In 1979 Stephen Kaufman penned a groundbreaking essay on Deuteronomy, arguing that it was a meticulously structured and carefully composed book. In his view, chapters 12 to 26 in particular follow the…
A large mistake is made in understanding Romans if one assumes that Paul is concerned with proving the fact that no one can ever live without sin—or that all attempts at obeying God’s commands are at least tainted with human sinfulness. The first problem with such an assumption is that…
This is the second in a series of studies on the Third Word, and especially on the food laws of Deuteronomy 14. In the second part of this series, I argue that Moses’ reworking of the Ten Words in Deuteronomy 5 includes adding nuance to the Third Word. This prepares…
Recent months have brought a lively discussion of Christian participation in the culture war. On the one hand, the pro-life movement appears to be making some slow progress on the abortion issue. The trial of abortionist and serial murderer Kermit Gosnell has the potential to awaken those who are nominally…
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Frederic Jameson’s Antinomies of Realism continues the argument he made a couple of decades ago in Signatures of the Visible . In that earlier book, Jameson argues that realism depended on “prolonging and preserving - rather than ‘resolving’ - [a] constitutive tension and incommensurability.” That tension is inherent in realism’s…
Duncan Kelly argues in his lengthy TLS review of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century that the “book is as much a story about the limits of modern democratic politics as it is about the structures of inequality.” That is not simply about the anti-democratic role that wealth plays…
Walter Brueggemann’s Sabbath As Resistance is, like most of Brueggemann’s other work, bracing and frustrating in equal measure. He rightly sees the Sabbath command in connection with the first commandment: Worshiping the God of the exodus means worshiping a God who delivers from the demanding, restless gods of Egypt and…
Justin McGuirk argues in his Radical Cities that Latin American was the site of the “greatest experiments in urban living of the twentieth century. Latin America, let us not forget, experienced mass urbanisation long before China and Africa, which today produce almost panic-inducing statistics of urban population growth. In the…
“Sensing that Africa had been cast aside by the West in the wake of the Cold War,” writes Howard French in China’s Second Continent , “Beijing saw the continent as a perfect proving ground for some Chinese companies to cut their teeth in international business.” That Africa is rich in…
Socrates’s discussion of purity in the Sophist treats the concept in a refined fashion. He admits the existence of bodily impurities, but his focus is on the mental impurities that need to be cleansed if someone is to escape the evils of ignorance and error. Benjamin Jowett provides this summary…
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