Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
[This essay was originally published in 1988. Given the situation that our new national socialists are getting the world into, I thought it might be useful to reprint it here. – JBJordan] The Bible has quite a bit to say about gold, silver, and precious stones, and the Bible always…
I wrote this elsewhere and was encouraged to put it here. It is a comment on what a pastor is. Today, this is not very well understood, and God’s people suffer because of it. There are four professions: medicine, education, law, and religion. Each of these, when done at a…
James Jordan recently pointed out in private conversation how appropriate it is, in John’s Gospel, that Nicodemus is present both to ask Jesus about being born again, and to see Jesus re-enter the womb of the mother. Nicodemus rhetorically asks, “How can a man be born when he is old?…
This is a problematic and much discussed passage. I’ve been discussing it in another forum, and have decided to move it here and present some very preliminary observations about it. One large question is this: Who is the speaker here and what is his situation? Traditionally, the speaker is seen…
1. The current issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction includes a good fantasy novella by John C. Wright, who since his conversion has been writing Christianly. This is a fine fantasy with nods to C. S. Lewis and Antoine de Saint-Exupery, and probably Gene Wolfe as well.…
“It is an experience of our days that the spoken name of Jesus alone exercises an unforeseen power; and the effort which it cost to speak this name is perhaps connected to some faint apprehension of the power which is inherent within it. Wherever the name of Jesus Christ is…
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Judith Gundry's contribution to The Child in the Bible examines the place of children in Mark's gospel, with particular focus on the episode of Jesus blessing the children. It's an illuminating essay. Mark includes no infancy narratives, but regularly shows Jesus exerting the power of the kingdom to rescue and…
In his Happiness Paradox , Ziyad Marar explores the sources of "justification." Humiliation is a uniquely human form of suffering. How do we deal with it? Our strategies for staving off humiliation are strategies of "justification." Freud offers some possibilities, He "enumerates a range of ways we avoid this kind…
Virginia Woolf, atheist though she was, couldn't avoid religious language when she spoke about her writing. Writing began from "a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words." It was her "shock-receiving capacity is…
Robert Brandom ( Tales of the Mighty Dead , 13-14) observes a continuity between Hegel and Kant: Both take concepts as "norms for judgment. They determine proprieties of application to particulars of terms that, because of the normative role they play in such judgments, express universals." But then Hegel adds…
Did the Council of Trent allow communion in both kinds, in bread and wine? The answer is complicated. Nathan Mitchell ( Oxford History of Christian Worship , 338-9) writes that "After intense behind-the-scenes negotiations, Pope Pius IV authorized communion in both species for German (16 April 1564). In effect, the…
Reviewing Carlos Eire's Reformations at First Things , Eamon Duffy claims that "Protestantism 'desacralized' the world by accepting an essentially binary division of reality into spirit and matter. That division was expressed in Reformation iconoclasm and the rejection of the notion that material objects—the bread and wine of the Mass,…
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