Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Why there is more to Jephthah than meets than eye It was not that long ago that I realized the Jephthah-story and the Jesus-story were basically the same story. Sounds crazy, I know. But here is a one-paragraph synopsis of both: The people of God have gone their own way,…
G.K. Chesterton famously said that the Gospels don’t reveal Jesus’ mirth. It’s true we never catch Jesus laughing. But can we believe He never did? I don’t think so. Laughter is human, and Jesus was fully human. Jesus promised that those who mourned would laugh. He mourned; would He not…
Matthew 2 has all the elements of an exodus story. There’s a murderous king, who slaughters Jewish babies. There’s a infant who will be Israel’s future deliverer, saved from the murderous king so He can later return to save His people and lead them to the Promised land. There’s an…
The calendar of Israel was primarily theological, centered on commemorating the salvific acts of God, but also agricultural, celebrating the creation-restoring effects of those salvific acts. The feasts of the first month celebrated the reviving of the world in the Spring, and typified the cutting off of the Savior in…
The chiastic shape corresponds to the shape of human life. This should not surprise us, because we are made in the image of God, and God is manifest in Word and Spirit. If we are living epistles, our lives will look a bit like the literary shape of the books…
Back in January, Venkatesh Rao wrote a fascinating post on the Ribbonfarm blog, discussing different forms of models of narrative. Engaging with Ursula LeGuin’s talk ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ , Rao explores her contrast between the (male) ‘hero narrative’ and the (female) ‘carrier-bag story’, and suggests a third…
Showing page 83 of 309
Showing page 18 of 43
“Civil society” typically refers to private and voluntary institutions distinct from both the bureaucracies of the nation-state and the economic institutions of the market. It includes “mediating institutions” like the family, the Moose Lodge, charities, churches, unions, the Chamber of Commerce, educational institutions, United Way, neighborhoods, softball teams, professional associations,…
Pulling together the important “content” of Rowan Williams’s profound, masterful 2008 study of Dostoevsky inevitably distorts, since much of the book consists of sensitive readings of Dostoevskian texts. Williams begins with a text, analyzing a confession from an 1854 letter: “if someone were to prove to me that Christ was…
It is often said that we come to worship to give and not to receive. That is a dangerous half-truth. Praise, thanks, adoration are all part of worship, of course, and God delights in our praise. But in worship as in all of life, we have nothing to give unless…
The consensus of modern critical scholarship is that the book assigned to Isaiah was in fact composed by several different hands. “Deutero-Isaiah” supposedly begins with Isaiah 40:1. There are many good reasons for rejecting this conclusion. Among these, the narrative pattern of chapters 36-39 is a neglected piece of evidence.…
James hooks the different sections of his epistle together by using the same or a similar word at the close of one section and the opening of the following section. James 1:1 ends with the word “greetings” (Greek, chairein ), and his first exhortation is to “consider it all joy…
In the introduction to What Hath God Wrought , his contribution to the Oxford History of the United States, Daniel Walker Howe quotes an 1850 Methodist women’s magazine’s ecstasies over the telegraph: “This noble invention is to be the means of extending civilization, republicanism, and Christianity over the earth. It…
Showing page 364 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
