Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The story of Judges 19 and the subsequent chapters are some of the most shocking and appalling accounts in all of Scripture. The callousness of the old host and the Levite, and the monstrous brutality of the men of Gibeah, leaves us feebly scrabbling for words by which to surmount…
David has become king. He has conquered the capital city of Jerusalem. He has brought the ark of Yahweh into the city and placed it in a tent. He has stationed Levites at the tent to offer sacrifices of praise. An anomaly hits him: He has a cedar-paneled palace, and…
In Part 2 of this series we traced what we have of the development of the epiclesis in the liturgy of the Church. In this third and final part we’ll look at the theological implications of this and how we may apply what we’ve learned. As we saw in Part…
In a 2014 piece published in First Things , I offered a "wish list" for Protestant churches, a checklist for a future catholic Protestantism. The wish list doesn't cover everything. It doesn't mention those things that Protestants, especially Evangelicals, already do, often exceedingly well, things like missions and evangelism and…
In the first part of this series we examined the meaning of “blessing” in Scripture and its parallels in Jewish liturgical tradition, but did not find anything that we could properly call an epiclesis (an invocation of the Holy Spirit). We did find examples of invocation of Jesus to “come”…
When the Aaronic priests were ordained, the blood of the ram of "filling” was placed on the lobe of the right ear, the right thumb, and the right big toe (Lev. 8:22-24). Similarly, the cleansing rite for a leper included smearing the right ear lobe, thumb, and big toe with…
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Following the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, young English noblemen began traveling the continent in what became known as the Grand Tour. Along the way, the came across Italian landscape painters, and went home dreaming of turning England into little Italy. Maggie Lane writes, “The desire was awakened to create…
Most of England’s enclosure acts were passed between 1760 and 1815, and the acts transformed the British landscape. Before enclosure, yeoman farmers lived in villages, and trudged each day to their scattered strips of land to work. Before enclosure, according to Maggie Lane, “one-third of the land enclosed in England…
Chesterton admits that Dickens’s characters neither affect nor are affected by time or circumstances. This is, he says, because Dickens was constructing myths rather than novels: “Dickens was a mythologist rather than a novelist; he was the last of the mythologists, and perhaps the greatest. He did not always manage…
PROVERBS 19:5, 9 In this, the Proverb reiterates the threats of the Torah, which warns against false witness and false oaths (Leviticus 19:12; Deuteronomy 17:6-7). These two verses are almost identical. Both begin with “A false witness will not go unpunished,” and in the second line both use the phrase…
Rojek again: He claims that the story of celebrity over the past two centuries has been a shift from ascribed (hereditary) to attributed celebrity. Though some achieved international fame in earlier times, “they were always under strong pressures to conform to the established procedures and conventions set by the Court.”…
In their book, Cool Rules , Dick Pountain and David Robins define cool as “a permanent state of private rebellion,” one which “conceals its rebellion behind an ironic impassivity.”
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