Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Jonah is Paul’s typological opposite. Indeed, in the whole Old Testament, it would be difficult to find a more perfect foil to Paul than Jonah. Whereas Paul crosses the sea to enact God’s saving purposes for the Gentiles, Jonah crosses the sea to avoid bringing Gentiles God’s mercy. For that…
Years ago, I realized that if my children wanted to feel like their house was a home, I needed to be intentional about making our physical shelter a place of spiritual refuge. I began to see the Holy Spirit as the indwelling person of the Trinity—the one who makes His…
When the crowds encircle Christ in Solomon’s Porch during the Festival of Dedication, they charge him: “tell us boldly who you are!” 1 They do not draw-up to him to with excited anticipation as they did earlier in the Gospel, 2 instead they flank him like a gang of wolves.…
1 In Deuteronomy 7:1-5, Moses wrote: When Yahweh your God brings you into the land which you go to possess, and has cast out many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations…
Every Advent witnesses the gruesome reanimation of the voice that whispers “you know , Christmas is just a pagan holiday…” with that sort of conversational ellipsis that does not so much invite further reflection but halts and forecloses it. The claims are several and equally spurious: Jesus wasn’t born on…
Abraham's life in Genesis is a series of trials. He travels hundreds of miles from his family into a new land, flees from a famine into the hands of a king who takes his wife, and after returning, has to rescue his brother from a war. He's involved with two…
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Desmond offers an intriguing argument for a unified self, for an “idiotic” self in the original sense of idiotes , what is one’s own. There is an irreducible “mineness” to all our actions and experience, a mineness that cannot be reduced to categories or analyzed in terms of outside forces:…
Desmond takes another enthralling step. If “seeing is” may be “seeing is,” then metaphor might reveal being. “Metaphor may be a revelation of reality. Metapherein - the thing carries itself across to revelation, metaphorizes itself; this is its spread beyond univocal identity. In its self-metaphorizing, it reaches out to more,…
It might seem that saying things have determinate qualities undermines their dynamism, while emphasizing things dynamism of things fuzzies all the boundaries to the point where there are no things at all. Desmond, again, demurs. We cannot have a pure flux without any determinacy, because then “there would be no…
Modern thought is often materialist. Whatever happens to spirit in such an outlook, at least we’ve got things left. Right? Not so, argues William Desmond ( Being and the Between ) . The doctrine of primary and secondary qualities, he says, is a “classic bifurcation of thinghood into two extremes…
As I noted a few weeks ago, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen points out that everyone has multiple identities, and that these identities slip into the foreground and background in different settings. At a family reunion, our family identity is prominent. At a political rally, family identity recedes as we join…
In separating philosophy and theology, Spinoza mounts a kind of historicist critique of the Bible; its authors are bound by the assumptions of their time and culture. Besides that, the Bible and philosophy are completely different in method and style; the Bible is narrative, and its truth depends on the…
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