Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
There’s something about joy that is infectious. And occasionally, we all have the opportunity to be in someone’s presence who is so happily engaged in their work, so joyous in their pursuits, that we want to learn from them. We want to know where that joy comes from and attain…
Jesus has told us that He intends all nations to be discipled. Nations. Not just individuals. All nations as theocracies. That being the case, the Church exists for the life of the world. Being baptized is not only a matter of becoming part of a new family, it is also…
Harold Bloom’s essay on Macbeth includes the kind of penetrating insights that make Bloom the great Shakespearean scholar that he is, but it also includes his typical and intense anti-Christian bias. “If Lear was pre-Christian, then Macbeth is weirdly post-Christian. There are, as we have seen, Christian intimations that haunt…
Revelation 16 is a day of atonement text. The tabernacle of the testimony has been opened (15:5). The angels who receive the bowls are clothed in linen (15:6), the clothing of the high priest when he goes into the sanctuary on the day of atonement (Leviticus 16:4). The temple is…
From time to time, when I’ve lectured on how to read the Bible, I’ve used art-music as one example thereof. When we listen to a simple folk song, we hear the same melody over and over again, but this is not how composers write "high" music. Let me amplify. A…
"For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea-monster, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth" (Matthew 12:40). Some reflections on Jonah’s Big Fish have led to the following essay. Let me…
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Seizing power doesn't make a revolution. When you seize speech, then you've got a chance at total revolution. Writing of the French Revolution, James Billington writes ( Fire in the Minds of Men , 34-5), " four-letter outbursts of the youthful demonstrators in the late 196os echoed the political shock…
You could find anything in the cafes of the Palais Royal in the last decades of the eighteenth century: "Distinctions of rank were obliterated, and men were free to exercise sexual as well as political freedom. In the course of a single visit, one might sip such libations of liberation…
Toward the end of Corpus Mysticum , Henri de Lubac says that one of the most serious results of the shifts in Eucharistic theology he examines is "the devaluation of symbols." Augustine's entire theology was about "signs" and "things." In the late Middle Ages, "consideration of 'signs' would soon suffer…
"In the summer of 1789, absolute monarchy and aristocratic authority were overthrown forever in the most powerful kingdom," writes James Billington in Fire in the Minds of Men (20). If something happens, it must be possible. Just so: The French Revolution was "the hard fact that gave birth to the…
Josiah's death is a reverse exodus because it's first an inverted Passover. Zechariah describes a scene of mourning like the “mourning on the plain of Megiddo,” a reference to the death of Josiah (Zechariah 12:11). But the mourning Zechariah describes is also like the mourning of Egypt over their firstborn.…
Was the American Revolution a Revolution? Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (ERH) concludes it was a “half-revolution” rather than a total revolution on the scale of the Russian, French, Puritan, Reformation, and Papal revolutions. Evaluating the revolutionary character of the American Revolution rests partly on the question of what “revolution” meant to the…
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