Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Along His journey to Jerusalem, Jesus stops frequently to have meals, three times with Pharisees (7:37-50; 11:37-54; 14:1-35). Meals were central to Jesus’ ministry. He comes “eating and drinking” (Luke 7:34). While His meals are not just for refreshment, they are opportunities for teaching the protocols of the kingdom. Meals…
Time as a realm of participation can be difficult for us imaginatively to grasp. While music is a profoundly temporal art, exploring the medium of time like no other, most of our temporal experience seems decidedly unmusical in character, disjointed and unorchestrated. The form in which we naturally discover time…
John devotes much attention to Jesus’ burial clothes. He tells us that Nicodemus brought about a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes to spice Jesus body, and that He was bound in linen wrappings. We find out that His body and His head were wrapped separately. (John 19:39-40; 20:6-7). When…
Thinking about time in terms of music also helps us to appreciate its unity and inner relations. Henri Bergson observes our cultural habit of dividing time into discrete moments, and conceiving of these as if akin to objects in a spatial succession. [1] Against such a notion, Bergson argues for…
As we attend to these and other aspects of music’s temporality, Begbie suggests, we will find means by which to resist some of our habitual modern ways of conceptualizing time, most especially our tendency to conceive of time as if it were a homogeneous set of technologically quantifiable units laid…
The Hidden Dimension In many fields of scientific study, the apparent complications and contradictions are dispelled once the internal logic is perceived. Biblical hermeneutics is no different, since the author of Creation is the Author of the Word. The Bible’s literary labyrinth radiates organically from an algorithm so simple it…
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Augustine Thompson ( Cities of God ) strongly disputes the notion that Italian urban communes of the late medieval period were “secular” organizations. They were religious, so much so that the city was defined and named as the seat of the bishop: “The city: the church. The church: the bishopric.…
When the Lamb takes the book, the angels sing a new song, a song of kingship (Revelation 5:8-10). In it, the sum up the work of the Lamb in a triadic formula that expands to a quaternity. The Lamb 1) was slain 2) to purchase for God from every tribe,…
Through the mid-19th century, American culture was dominated by a moral establishment that used the coercive authority of the state to enforce certain patterns of Christian morality. According to David Sehat ( The Myth of American Religious Freedom ), that establishment began to be challenged from within the universities, and…
At the end of his Word Made Global , Mark Gornik lists a number of the gifts that African churches can offer to the rest of the church. One is “an invitation to name ourselves by Pentecost”: “Through the name of Jesus, African Christians believe that the Spirit brings forth…
The early life of Moses anticipates the later history of Israel. Moses is rescued from water, flees from an attack by Pharaoh, finds water in the wilderness, meets Yahweh on the mountain of God, moves to a new land. The life of Moses also looks backward, recapitulating the life-history of…
Back in 1960, less that 15% of the population of the US was non-European. Most of that minority were blacks. That proportion has more than doubled in the fifty years since: “the growth of non- Europeans is expected to continue at an accelerated rate. In just the last twenty years…
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