Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Ten-thousand ‘yeses’ and a single ‘no.’ From bough it dangles, beauty to the eyes, For belly, food, a fruit to make one wise. Too soon, they eat; they know; the leaves they sew, But, oh! the Love who asks, “Where did you go?” Confessions flow from under leaf’s disguise; A…
In his masterful work, De Doctrina Christiana , Augustine of Hippo writes: I would have learned men to know that the authors of our Scriptures use all those forms of expression which grammarians call by the Greek name tropes, and use them more freely and in greater variety than people…
“In accordance with the creation pattern, God sovereignly took hold of Adam and put him to sleep. Then God divided Adam by removing flesh and bone from his side, and restructured humanity into male and female. When Adam awoke, God distributed the woman to him. Adam gazed upon her and…
Greta Gerwig’s new film, Barbie, has been criticized, probably rightly, for having too many ideas and layers to properly bring in any for a landing. Gerwig herself thought the script was so “ wild and anarchic ” that she was surprised WB agreed to make it. Many see it as…
“Now John wore a garment of camel’s hair and a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey” (Matt. 3:4). Why is John the Baptizer clothed with camel’s hair? Why does he want to look like a camel? Or at least: what does he expect…
In the second greatest story ever told, The Brothers Karamazov , Fyodor Dostoyevsky tells the story of a family plagued by the lasting legacy of sin’s destructive power and the all-surpassing truth that God is Light and in Him is no darkness. The young protagonist, Alyosha, is a monk committed…
Showing page 29 of 309
Showing page 2 of 43
Wes Callihan writes, in response to my brief quotation from Lucretius: “Possibly, however, Lucretius wouldn’t consider the indifferent watcher from the porch outside Pompeii a true Epicurean. Doesn’t the very next line go on to say something about how the pleasure is *not* in the other person’s suffering but in…
Isaiah Berlin’s book on Hamann is lively engaging, but Berlin doesn’t get Hamann. For instance: “Hamann’s constantly repeated point is that revelation is direct contact between one spirit and another, God and ourselves.” Not. The opposite is the case: His constantly repeated point is that God speaks to the creature…
Book 2 of De rerum natura begins with “It is sweet on the great sea to watch from the shore other people drowning.” The words were found on a wall on a house in Pompeii. Perhaps someone sweetly watched from a perch opposite Vesuvius as the lava flow swallowed up…
Athanasius ties the Arians up in knots with an order-of-decrees argument. If the Son is created for the sake of creating us, then the Son exists for our need rather than we for His sake. That suggests a particular ordering of God’s will: “It is not that God, having the…
Athanasius says that “the words of human beings do not act.” Instead, “it is not by words but by hands that a human being works, for human hands have subsistence while words do not.” Hence, he is willing to adopt Irenaeus’s notion that the Son and Spirit are the two…
Athanasius ( Orations Against the Arians ) writes that “God is not like us.” This is in the context of explaining how the eternal Word differs from the ephemeral words of human beings, and how the divine Word actually does what it says: “the Word of God is not, as…
Showing page 1460 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
