Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Optimism is “an inclination to put the most favorable construction upon actions and events or to anticipate the best possible outcome.” 1 On the other hand, pessimism is “an inclination to emphasize adverse aspects, conditions, and possibilities or to expect the worst possible outcome.” We can see that optimism and…
If we wish to understand the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, we must begin with seeing them as a part of the creational order. Trees, along with plants and seed-bearing things, come to life by the word of God as part of…
“I chant slips and irreversible disasters, wiltings, failures, scars, the little disappointments and the large, blue streaks down a world that wishes it was only suncolors.” Paul J. Pastor from Kintsugi Song I recently lost something very valuable. Something I’d had for years and used every day. But, it wasn’t…
In his eponymous book, Jonah follows an exodus pattern. He travels through the waves and east of the city into the wilderness. On a first reading, it looks like another use of this common literary shape in the Old Testament: salvation through the waters of death and the wilderness of…
“Everyone serves the good wine first, and when people have drunk freely, then the poor wine. But you have kept the good wine until now.” The unknowing master of ceremonies didn’t know how right he was. We see this play out in John’s apocalypse. The end is like the beginning,…
Read in isolation, The Test of Adultery (Num 5:11-31) presents the reader with a seemingly bizarre ritual, conjuring up ideas bordering on the Salem Witch Trials. Beyond this, pressing questions linger—such as, “Why is the woman in particular singled out, while no test is provided for the husband of a…
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Jason Josephson-Storm ( Myth of Disenchantment ) offers this potted history of modern physics: "Even as Descartes liberated an autonomous realm for the thinking subject, his mechanism denied action at a distance and rejected the concept of the void. But this form of corpuscular mechanism was disrupted by Newton's emphasis…
"The habit of treating named entities such as Iroquois, Greece, Persia, or the United States as fixed entities opposed to one another by stable internal architecture and external boundaries interferes with our ability to understand their mutual encounter and confrontation," writes Eric Wolf in Europe and the People Without History…
"Human life is radical, constituent insecurity," writes Julian Marias ( Metaphysical Anthropology ). "It consists in having to do something, in a frequently hostile, always problematical, and largely latent circumstance, and in not knowing what to hold to. This is man's condition: his insecurity, his neediness, his ignorance, his indecision,…
Jason Josephson-Storm tells us what Weber's disenchantment is not : It doesn't mean that magic is eliminated. Protestants "were against magic and superstitious rituals" but they never doubted the reality of magic or the crowdedness of the universe ( Myth of Disenchantment , 280). Disenchantment also "is not a new…
Mary Emerson's Greek Sanctuaries and Temple Architecture is a concise, informative introduction to her topic. After introductory chapters explaining the meaning, uses, architecture and artistic adornments of sanctuaries in the Greek world, Emerson devotes a chapter to the major cultic sites of Greece - Delphi, Athens, the sanctuary of Apollo…
In his recently published Lewis on the Christian Life , Joe Rigney devotes a few pages to expounding Lewis's understanding of the relation between abstract theological statements and the images of Scripture. He endorses the abstractions as a caution against false inferences that might be drawn from the images, but…
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