Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Creationism is debated widely in the US, especially when it comes to teaching creation as an alternative theory of origins in public schools. Every few months, there’s another poll showing that many Americans still believe Ussher’s claim that the world was created around 4000 BC, which always elicits a contemptuous…
Walker Percy died in 1990, but his six published novels and his collections of essays are more relevant than when he wrote them. Percy was an American Dostoevsky, and that was no accident. “The European novels,” he says in a 1974 interview, “are more philosophical, more novels of ideas.” Dostoevsky,…
The Spirit is God’s agent for renewing the creation, for restoring bonds between nations, for knitting together people into the body of Christ. The Spirit is the renewer of the world, and the bond of all relations. That means that if you want your family to be knit together, if…
In their basic physical sense , the verbs translated as "persecute" in the Bible mean “chase” or “pursue,” and that fits the context quite naturally. As Pharaoh “pursued” (LXX, dioko ; Heb. radaph ) Israel into the wilderness, for example, so the dragon chases the woman back to her place…
Seng-Kong Tan’s Fullness Received and Returned is a densely argued, thoroughly researched, contextually sensitive study of participation in the soteriology of Jonathan Edwards. Along the way, Tan deals with many of the central themes in Edwards’s theology. As with many recent studies of Edwards, Tan’s monograph demonstrates both Edwards’s creativity…
The title of James Joyce’s first novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man indicates that it is a bildungsroman , a story of formation that describes the formative experiences of a poet who aspires to artistic greatness. The education described is Joyce’s own. The novel recounts the failing…
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The Chronicler’s brief, undetailed account of the reign of Jotham begins and ends formulaically. “Jotham was twenty-five years old when he began to reign, and he reigned sixteen years in Jerusalem,” we learn in 2 Chronicles 27:1. Seven verses later, in case we have forgotten, the same is repeated: “He…
Isaiah’s name contains a form of the verb yasha , “save,” like the names Joshua and Jesus. Isaiah means “Yah saves.” Isaiah’s name is a clue to one of the key themes of the book. Again and again, Isaiah repeats the ringing declaration that Yahweh is Savior, and each time…
Armen Avanessian's Present Tense: A Poetics is an intricate, illuminating study of the uses of tenses in fiction, and the changes in the uses of the past and present tense in the novels of high modernists. Käte Hamburger's work sets the terms for Avanaessian's discussion. On Hamburger's account, the past…
Nicholas Cook ( Music: A Very Short Introduction ) observes that “Advertisers use music to communicate meanings that would take too long to put into words, or that would carry no conviction in them." To illustrate, he cites a 1992 Prudential commercial that begins with a young man listening to…
On the fourth Sunday of Advent, 1511, a Dominican friar, Antonio de Montesinos, preached a sermon to the Spanish colonists in the main church of Santo Domingo. Bartolome de Las Casas was in the congregation that day, and the rest, as the say, is history. Here’s the central portion of…
In Local Justice , Jon Elster discusses various principles that guide the allocation of resources in local settings. One of the common principles is "absolute equality," which he thinks is defensible on various grounds: "Even when there is no consensus that equality is inherently fair, it is often the only…
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