Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
John 18:1-11 appears on the surface to be a straightforward, if somewhat unusual, narrative of Jesus’ arrest by officers of the chief priests and Pharisees accompanied by an apparently large group of Roman soldiers, all of them led by the betrayer, Judas. But there is much more here than what…
Why is the US embroiled in the Middle East? There are two primary answers: Oil and Israel. Both are fairly intractable problems, the latter in significant part because of the unique convergence of theology and politics that has forged American policy in the region. Dispensationalists insist that we must bless…
There’s a common theme that arises in the study of theologians James B. Jordan and Peter Leithart. It is this: Context matters. Details matter. This is God’s Word. The details are not arbitrary “filler” hiding the kernel of truth in the husk of the text. The husk and the kernel…
Perhaps the most fearful of all possibilities in the world is the possibility of betrayal on the part of someone who is in a “position of trust.” This, unfortunately, is the first block in what ought to be the foundation of every marriage in the world. Every woman has a…
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The way we talk about the world matters. Our doctrine of creation tells us that words do not simply reflect reality. They also shape it and the way we inhabit it. Among the world’s many language groups, the Church is distinct. She is called to name things with Scriptural language,…
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Of all the people I’ve seen on film recently, the one I’d most want to be is David Berlinski, whom Ben Stein interviewed extensively in his Paris apartment that reeked with sophistication and culture. Berklinski, by his own definition a “secular Jew” with no memory of Hebrew, has just published…
In an intriguing piece in TNR , writer Cinque Henderson - who identifies himself as one of the few remaining Clinton supporters among African-Americans - explains Obama’s use of “hoodwinked” and “bamboozled” (not the first words to spring to Obama’s lips, one would think) in the South Carolina primary: “It…
Kristeva says that contemporary culture separates affects from language, which leads to a loss of soul. Souls are empty. To help, our culture offers drugs and entertainment. Drugs flatten experience to a drone; entertainment dazzles momentarily with two-dimensional images. So do our solutions increase the problem. Flat remedies for flat…
Kristeva’s distinction of semiotic and symbolic is intended to overcome the dualism of traditional linguistic theories, the dualism of body and language, or matter and language. For Kristeva, the “semiotic” is the way drives are organized or “discharged” in language, and thus includes everything that is meaningful in language but…
Julia Kristeva notes that Saussure’s linguistic theory permits “linguistics to claim a logical, mathematical formalization on the one hand, but on the other, it definitely prevents reducing a language or text to one law or one meaning.” This latter point is true because by splitting the sign into signified and…
Desmond thinks that dialectic makes some gains: It affirms the “complex sense of unity,” appreciates mediation, critiques dualism, defends the “interplay and community of immanence and transcendence.” But dialectic cannot be the final moment of metaphysics. Why? “The problem is that if we privilege self-mediation and erect this into the…
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