Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I live in an area where Mardi Gras is in full swing, and I can remember from my upbringing that Fat Tuesday was a last ditch effort at debauchery before the pseudo-spiritual practice of “giving something up for Lent” really began. In my youth I would give up some kind…
Part 1: Observations from the Texts (Matthew 9:14-17, Mark 2:18-22, Luke 5:33-39) The precipitating context for the new wine/old wineskins discussion is people asking Jesus why His disciples did not fast. His immediate answer is that you can’t get the friends of the groom to fast at the bachelor party…
Simply, “progress” means to move forward. In that sense, a slug can progress from one end of the sidewalk to the other. But for us in twenty-first century America, progress means something else. For us, it is almost a synonym for goodness. The slug can only “progress” if the other…
I have the privilege of being able to counsel a lot of women who are seeking abortions. I can tell you that the majority of them are seeking to end their pregnancies not because they feel like it would be a fun thing to do, but because they are scared…
Last night, along with a few online friends, I watched this debate on the meaning of life between William Lane Craig, Rebecca Goldstein, and Jordan Peterson, hosted by Wycliffe College. While watching it, and reflecting upon Peterson’s work more generally (about which I’ve written in the past ), I was…
I’m glad to have been invited to contribute regularly to the Theopolis Institute website. Thank you, readers, for welcoming and joining what I hope will be a venture of integration. Integration itself is what I want to explore. And for me personally, this is the shape of my current integrative…
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Malcolm Moore reports this morning in the London Telegraph on Mikhail Gorbachev’s visit to the tomb of St. Francis, and Gorbachev’s public confession of Christian faith. Moore writes in part: “Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Communist leader of the Soviet Union, has acknowledged his Christian faith for the first time, paying…
John Ciardi writes ( How Does A Poem Mean? ) about poets who delight in hiding away meanings, often etymological, in the words they use: “they do not insist that every reader respond to them; it is enough that such touches delight the writer and are ready to delight the…
With papyrological evidence, there’s some grounds for saying that there’s considerable overlap between the vocabulary and syntax of NT Greek and “street Greek.” Barr, though, thinks the same about Hebrew: “In Israel at any rate much of the biblical language is unspecialized, for the religious structure is roughly coincident with…
James Barr directs most of his critical and rhetorical power at Kittel, but he’s got some criticisms of Bauer, Arndt, and Gingrich too. Specifically, BAG “is too content to give semantic indications which presuppose, and are intelligible only in terms of, a more modern intellectual and cultural Weltanschauung than that…
James Barr is a famous enemy of “illegitimate totality transfer,” but he freely acknowledges that there’s a proper kind of totality. Using the word “ekklesia,” he lists some NT statements about the church (the church is body of Christ, bride, first installment of kingdom, etc.), and says that “the ‘meaning…
Drudge has a full transcript of Obama’s speech concerning race, which includes this statement about his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, that impressively combines sharp criticism with affection for Wright and his church: “I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some,…
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