Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I just finished re-reading G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday . I have in the past had the temerity to say that I believe it to be the best novel of the 20th century. Be that as it may, I still maintain that it is at least one…
And Simeon blessed them and said to Mary his mother, “Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is spoken against and a sword will pierce through your own soul also, that thoughts out of many hearts may be…
I was inspired to write this article after reading John Ahern’s The Case for Shorter Hymnals first published on Theopolis Institute’s website on November 16, 2021. Mr. Ahern and I are writing with different audiences and emphases in mind. I am thankful we both share a mutual desire to see…
If you’ve spent any time in the social-media galaxy of Christian cultural commentators, you have almost definitely run across the Latin phrase Imago Dei . It means image of God . Why they usually say it in Latin, I couldn’t tell you. We saw it in the wake of the…
The Gospel of Matthew—indeed, the New Testament—begins with a list of names, and that list of names is introduced by this heading: “The book of the generations of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” Why start like this? Why “the son of David” and “the son…
A blade is raised. A child wails. But the brow under the crown is untroubled. Solomon knows that the raising of the sword will reveal the true parent and the identity of the son. But how did he know this? Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac certainly bears some of the…
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Burckhardt notes the parallels between the nobility of late antique Persia and the knights of the Western middle ages: “The nobility itself, with its bluff chivalry, is quite Western. Its formal relationship to the King appears to have bene feudal; its principal obligation was assistance in war. As represented in…
A sentence from Burckhardt’s description of the Persian campaigns of Galerius: “But two indecisive battles and a third which Galerius lost through excessive boldness again drenched with Roman blood the desolate plain between Carrhae and the Euphrates where Crassus had once led ten legions to their death.” What does one…
Burckhardt once again, describing the spread of Semitic religion through the empire: “From the Old Testament, we know Baalzebub, Baalpeor, Baalberith, and the like, whose names may have been long forgotten. In Palmyra Baal seems to have been divided into two divinities for sun and moon, as Aglibol and Malachbel,…
Burckhardt again, describing the Roman spread of the Isis cult: “Roman arms spread the worship of Isis to the frontiers of the Empire, in the Netherlands as in Switzerland and South Germany. It penetrated private life more thoroughly and earlier than the cult of the great Semitic goddess.” Thus an…
Jacob Burckhardt ( Age of Constantine the Great ) describes the temple of Isis at Hieropolis: “Its Ionic colonnades resting upon masonry terraces with huge propylaea, upon a hill which towered over the city, made a brilliant and conspicuous spectacle. It is remarkable that this temple precinct, with its wild…
For many throughout church history, fasting is bound up with hostility to matter and the body. We refrain from bodily pleasures of food and drink to train our souls in disembodied life. That’s not biblical. The biblical fast, as Isaiah 58 puts it, is to share food with the hungry…
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