Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I grew up in the 1950s. This was before the "Sixties" and the democratization, informalization, and general cheapening of the church and her worship. Ministers were Father Donovan, Pastor Eckhart, Reverend MacPherson, Mister (Episcopal) Parker, and Brother Smith. Liturgical speech was high language, sounding kind of like the King James…
Metaphor exerts a surprisingly powerful influence within our thinking. Although it is easily dismissed as little more than a figure of speech, when we attend more closely to the ways in which we use it, metaphor’s importance swiftly becomes more apparent. Although many of our metaphors have become quite invisible…
What is a tree, scientifically speaking? A mere googling gives the following answer: “a woody perennial plant, typically having a single stem or trunk growing to a considerable height and bearing lateral branches at some distance from the ground.” We can increase detail by describing its family, genus, species and…
The majority of Western evangelical Christians rarely, if ever, fast as a form of spiritual discipline. In our culture, fasting is more connected with dieting than worship, the other side of our deeply ambiguous fascination with food. Food is everywhere. We eat more than ever before, at greater speed, and…
A Grammar of Creation An understanding of the visual-musical language of the Bible must begin with Genesis 1. This is fortunate, because when explaining biblical types to academics, as opposed to children, one is repeatedly forced to start from scratch. From birth, a healthy child is attuned to rhythm and…
In an inverse Eden, a land laid waste, one works alone tending the trash. There are none like him in all the earth, inquisitive, playful and most drawn to those mysterious, dancing bipedal creatures who lost earth and left it to go wandering the vast wilderness of space. Humans have…
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When Aaron and his sons were ordained, they were washed, vested, and anointed (Leviticus 8:6-9). When Aaron approached the Most Holy Place on the Day of Atonement, he puts on linen clothes and washes (16:4). There is no anointing, he removes the garments of glory. The ordination rite goes in…
Faith is the discernment of things unseen. Faith looks for a city yet to come, not made with hands. To any visible arrangement of things, faith stands with Faust in his refusal of “Stay, you are so fair.” Faith says to every human construction, “Good, but not it .” Faith’s…
In a contribution to Ancient Mediterranean Sacrifice , David Frankfurter analyzes several contexts of Egyptian religion on the way to a critique of the whole category of “sacrifice.” In some of these contexts, no animals were slaughtered; no violence done. In some contexts, though, animals were killed. He elaborates on…
Jonathan Klawans asserts in an essay in Ancient Mediterranean Sacrifice that “symbolic action was an undeniably central feature of ancient Israelite culture” (114). As evidence, he points to passages in the Hebrew Bible that highlight the memorial function of rituals. Passover, Sukkot, Sabbath, circumcision, phylacteries are all presents as communicative…
In his treatise On Abstinence from Killing Animals , Porphyry states a principle of philosophical sacrifice: Different strokes for different deities. For “intelligible gods,” the best worship is “hymn-singing in words,” since “sacrifice is an offering to each god from what he has given, with which he sustains us and…
John Steven explains at Slate why the ceasefire in South Sudan, like many ceasefires, could well backfire” “The cease-fire is making it worse. Indeed, this uncomfortable truth isn’t even unique to South Sudan. Cease-fires almost always make a conflict worse, delaying political deals, prolonging the killing, and ensuring that the…
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