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Writing

Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.

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Biblical Studies

Exile or Ark?

In the Fall 2007 issue of JBL is an essay “Jonah Read Intertextually” by Hyun Chul Paul Kim of Methodist Theological School in Delaware, Ohio. The first section of the essay points to numerous linguistic and conceptual parallels between Jonah (“Dove”) and the Noah narrative: Destruction of the earth, including…

by James B. JordanApril 10, 2008
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Biblical Studies

How Mark Came to be Written

The phone rang. “Hello, this is John Mark.” “Hi, JM. This is Simon Peter.” “Oh, hello, Mr. Rock,” said Mark. “What can I do for you?” “Well, JM” said Peter, “I’ve been very impressed by your recent essays in the New Jew Review , especially your series on David as…

by James B. JordanMarch 24, 2008
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Biblical Studies

How Matthew Came to be Written

The sun had set and finally the crowds had dispersed. The disciples gathered in the upper room, exhausted but joyful after preaching and teaching in many different languages all day, not to speak of seeing to the baptism of three thousand people. James bar Alphaeus put on a CD of…

by James B. JordanMarch 20, 2008
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Biblical Horizons

Church-Culture | Cause-Effect

There was a time, I think, when Evangelical Christianity in North America tended to be dominated by what might be (pejoratively) called a “retreatist” or even “defeatist” view of society. For various reasons, Christians believed that society was headed downhill and there was nothing the Church could do about it,…

by Mark HorneMarch 14, 2008
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Genesis

Is Genesis 15 an Attack on Forensic Justification?

Hebrews 11 makes it very clear that Abram (later, Abraham) exercised saving faith from the time he left his home to go wonder in Caanan. He was justified at least from the time of the call in Genesis 12.1-3 on. Yet I keep reading people who think that any appeal…

by Mark HorneMarch 6, 2008
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Biblical Horizons

On Renewing Theology

I spent the last few days at A Conversation on Denominational Renewal , which thankfully met in St. Louis. The conference was well attended, about 300 or more people. The audience was mostly PCA ministers and elders, but because it was held in St. Louis there were a good many…

by Jeff MeyersMarch 1, 2008

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Athens’s success

Danielle Allen has a fascinating review of Josiah Ober’s Democracy and Knowledge in the TNR (3/18). Allen notes that eighteenth century thinkers, including the American founders, considered Athenian democracy a failure, and concluded that “pure democracy devolved into either anarchy or rule by a corrupt managerial elite.” Ober’s volume, the…

March 11, 2009

Paglia on Rush

Camille Paglia can be depended upon for thinking for herself. In an essay at Salon.com, she calls for Obama to be freed from the “flacks, fixers and goons — his posse of smirky smart alecks and provincial rubes, who were shrewd enough to beat the slow, pompous Clintons in the…

March 11, 2009
History

Constantine and Ecclesial Polis

In her book on Constantine’s marriage legislation, Judith Evans Grubbs suggests that Constantine was not trying to “Christianize” law but to give “to the Christian ecclesiastical establishment powers and privileges with which it was able to take over new functions and amass more wealth and influence . . . .…

March 11, 2009
Art

Everyday Aesthetics

David Cooper reviews Yuriko Saito’s recent Everyday Aesthetics in the February 20 issue of the TLS . He suggests that “Saito exposes to main dimensions of the embedded character of everyday aesthetic reactions”: “First, they are highly context-dependent, in a way that responses to ark works - which are normally…

March 10, 2009

Outliers

I’ve read several devastating reviews of Malcolm Gladwell’s latest in the past few weeks, but Carol Tavris ( TLS , 2/20) takes the prize. She identifies the main problem with Gladwell’s work as the “except when it doesn’t” problem. She writes, “the premiss of Outliers: The story of success is…

March 9, 2009
History

Keith Thomas

David Wootton ( TLS , 2/27) offers a fascinating account of what happened to Keith Thomas who, in his latest book, effaces himself and his contemporaries in a way that places him “at odds with the main trends in historical scholarship over the past forty years.” Wootton analyzes this as…

March 9, 2009

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