Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
When a certain Samaritan village refused Jesus’ attempt to visit, James and John asked Jesus if they should call down fire from heaven upon it. The allusion to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is evident, but, as the story shows, James’ and John’s thinking was entirely warped. Jesus rebuked…
In the first part of this essay, I considered paideia (formation)and mimesis (imitation) in the context of Aristotle’s virtue ethics and that of the New Testament. The overall concern is to realize how relevant is Aristotle’s ethics both to diagnosing our current malaise and to enculturing our children, though we…
In these posts I am inviting you into my philosophical reflection about integration , the absence of which we feel palpably in our fragmented world. My hope is for us to understand it more deeply, and to be ourselves reintegrated in the process. At this point in this extended inquiry…
It’s hard to imagine someone, centuries from now, mistaking our culture for a moral highpoint in the history of the West. Increasingly the news is dominated by school shootings, abusive policing, sexploitation of women, and increasing rates of suicide, addiction, and divorce. In response, the Left calls for regulations, surveillance,…
“The righteous cry out, and the Lord hears, and delivers them out of all their troubles. The Lord is near to those who have a broken heart, and saves such as have a contrite spirit.” (Ps. 34:17-18) God is listening. He is listening when we ask Him for financial provision,…
The allusions to Mt. Sinai in the transfiguration story point to Jesus as a new Moses and even more as Yahweh, the God who met Moses and Elijah on the mountain. The fact that Jesus, Moses, and Elijah spoke of Jesus’ “exodus” suggests that the mountain of transfiguration was intended…
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As David Goldman sees, it , last week's fatal accident involving an Uber self-driving car is emblematic of our techno-Utopianism. "If the brain is merely a machine that white-coated lab techs can measure and manipulate like any other machine, and if machines can programmed to emulate the human brain, then…
Eric Cohen puts his finger on one of the glaring flaws of Patrick Deneen's recent Why Liberalism Failed . Deneen's is a strangely ahistorical account of liberalism: "Deneen treats American society as if it is simply a Lockean (or Madisonian) abstraction. For a book that celebrates the importance of particular…
Ahaz of Judah makes "molten images for the Baals" (2 Chronicles 28:2). He's the only king in Chronicles to do so. The term massekah is used only twice in Chronicles, once of Ahaz's making, the other of Josiah's destruction of molten things (2 Chronicles 34:3-4). The term reaches back to…
Alan Hayward ( Creation and Evolution ) summarizes some of the evidence for an old earth. Some lines of evidence are fairly powerful. He points to sandwich structures on the ocean floor: A base of hardened sediment with fossils, a layer of large coral reefs, an upper layer of sediment…
Lytton Strachey, famed as a member of the "Bloomsbury Group" and for his war against Victorian values, wrote to Leonard (husband of Virginia) Woolf in 1904: "I sometimes feel as if it were not only ourselves who are concerned, but that the destinies of the whole world are somehow involved…
By the Chronicler's lights, Ahaz is the worst king Judah ever has. He is the only king of whom it's explicitly said that he did " not do right" (2 Chronicles 28:1). That not-right is unpacked with six more verbs, making a full seven of wickedness. 1)Did not do right,…
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