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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Robert Bellamy states the thrust of his "republican defense of constitutional democracy" up front ( Political Constitutionalism , viii). He rejects the common assumption that "a written, justiciable constitution, incorporating a bill of rights" is a "necessary safeguard against the abuse of power by democratic governments." Written constitutions often have…
Adam Kirsch can't bring himself to say that poet Richard Wilbur, who died last weekend, was a Christian. In a 2004 New Yorker review , he comes close - recognizing religious themes and describing him as a "Transcendentalist." Kirsch recognizes that Wilbur's religious vision infused his poetry: "the clean laundry…
In Benedict XVI: A Guide for the Perplexed (33-4), Tracey Rowland takes note of the Pope's sharp critique of popular music, including contemporary Christian music. Benedict "quotes Adorno’s judgement that ‘the fundamental characteristic of popular music is standardization’ and describes this as ‘incompatible with the culture of the Gospels, which…
Evolutionary theorists want to present evolution as a theory of everything. Benedict XVI ( Truth and Tolerance , 180-1) doesn't buy it. Philosophically, the question is "whether reason, or rationality, stands at the beginning of all things and is grounded in the basis of all things or not. The question…
In his book on sacral Kingship (90-1), Francis Oakley points to the disjunction between Augustine himself and the medieval writers to claimed his mantle. Augustine's political theology in the City of God has been read through the lends of his anti-Donatist writings. A more theocratic Augustine results: "the Augustine whom…
Gaul is still divided into three parts, according to Stefan McDaniel in a 2016 essay in First Things . Three parties are vying to determine the future of France - deconstructionists, children of 1968; reconstructionists, in search for new values to guide the country, including consideration of Islam; and classicists,…
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