Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I've pastored a very rural church for well over a decade. Our town has about 1,000 people and will never grow until Jesus returns. 38 people attend our worship on Sundays. Here's a quick list of what we’ve done to grow our church, and what I’ve done to survive pastorally.…
Thanks for sharing so honestly about your current crisis of creativity. I totally understand and relate to that; it’s happened many times in my musical life thus far, and I’ve begun to accept it as a normal rhythm of the creative process. I actually went through a serious dry spell…
The Broken Stones of Israel At Sinai, the tablets of the Law of Moses were broken and restored. The Old Testament is a history of “new covenants,” including that promised in Jeremiah and fulfilled in Zechariah. Ultimately, the vertical Oath and the horizontal Sanctions met in the death of Jesus…
Woe to the sinful nation. Woe to those who enlarge their estates and build their portfolios. Woe to the drunks. Woe to those who call evil good and good evil. Woe to the proud who are wise in their own eyes. Woe to Congressmen who pass unjust laws and to…
The interpretation of Romans 7:7-25 is notoriously difficult. Good scholars disagree on many aspects of the passage, but the central interpretative difficulty concerns the identity of the “I.” Is Paul referring to himself? Is Paul referring to himself pre- or post-conversion? Does the “I” refer to Adam? Is the “I”…
You board the Metra train at Arlington Heights station one afternoon, heading to downtown Chicago for some sight-seeing. As the train departs from the station, a man in jeans, a striped t-shirt, and a Kansas City Royals baseball cap enters your train car, and begins asking to see each passenger’s…
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Jeanne Halgren Kilde opens her When Church Became Theatre with a comparison of New Haven's First Church of Christ (built 1814) with First Baptist of Minneapolis (built 1886). There had been a shift in the exterior, from “the classical pastiche of Greek and Roman to a medieval one with Gothic…
In Psalm 80, the Psalmist is dismayed at Yahweh’s abandonment of His vine. Isaiah (Isaiah 5) laments but is not dismayed. He knows why the lover, his friend, has abandoned His vineyard-bride and now brings an indictment against her. What kind of grapes did Yahweh want? What kind of wine…
Human beings are temporal creatures, but our experience of time isn’t merely of the relentless tick-tock of clock time. Time has quality as well as duration. We can spend an hour waiting for a late bus, or we can spend an hour absorbed in a book or a lively conversation.…
In a NYT piece on a recent Galilean artifact, Isabel Kershner writes, “Experts have long believed that in the period before Herod’s Temple was destroyed in A.D. 70, synagogues were used as a general place of assembly and learning, something like a neighborhood community center. The more formal conception of…
In an essay on “Reformation” in her recent collection, The Givenness of Things , Marilynne Robinson observes that Latin remained culturally dominant in England even into the age of Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and Julian of Norwich. Latin's hegemony “did have the advantage of making the learned classes mutually intelligible across…
“The bare fact is,” says Rowan Williams ( The Edge of Words ), “that the material world speaks .” Material agents speak, “and this speech is not . . . a chance decorative addition to mechanical process, but an activity that is implicated in the entire complex of finite agency.…
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