Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
If 1 Chronicles were a movie, it would begin with two hours and forty-five minutes of credits: Name after name scrolling across the screen, most of them (as far as we’re concerned) obscurities and nonentities and unknowns, forgotten fathers and sons and mighty men; all the bit players in the…
Let me locate myself. I’m sitting on a sand dune, three hundred feet above the blue-as-a-swimmer-crab water of Lake Michigan. I’m so high above the surface that the sound of the waves flopping onto the beach is as quiet as wind easing through a screen door. Around me are several…
My title is too grand. What I offer here falls far short of a full description of poetry. I barely offer a definition. A more accurate title would be “Axioms and Suspicions About Poetry.” Axioms first. I have three of them. The first is the closest I can come to…
In his book In Defense of Food Michael Pollan does just what the title suggests, he defends food. Pollan argues that the presupposition behind modern food science, or “nutritionism” as he calls it, is that humans don’t need food, they need nutrients. To be sure, modern science is not yet…
The early church took possession of the Roman Empire within a few centuries, largely because she ministered sacrificially in word and deed. The church provided services and care that the empire and pagan religions could not in times of crisis. The faithful witness of those serving Christians bore great fruit…
My title, “The Original Murder” will be understood by many readers, if not almost all, to refer to Cain’s murder of Abel, but I have in mind the very first murder, the one which Jesus pointed to when He said that Satan was a murderer “from the beginning.” “You are…
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In a 1971 article, Ann Banfield writes, “If Mansfield is ‘modern, airy, and well-situated,’ the house at Sotherton, ‘built in Elizabeth’s time’ and ‘furnished in the taste of fifty years back,’ is ‘ill-placed,’ for ‘it stands in one of the lowest spots of the park.’ It is without the essential…
In an article in Studies in English Literature (2004), Michael Karounos notes that “The meaning of ordination was not restricted in 1814 to the meaning of assuming a religious office, nor, indeed, was that its primary definition. A glance at the OED demonstrates that trees, animals, and ideas may all…
In Book III of his poem “The Task,” the most popular poem of the late eighteenth century, William Cowper lamented how the lust for “improvement” has spoiled nature and the English character. Austen, who described Cowper as her favorite poet, might have had the poem open as she wrote Mansfield…
Brownson claims that baptism does not bring assurance in the sense of answering the question “How can I know if I really have true faith that relies on Christ alone?” That experience of assurance only comes through “the existential act of reliance upon God’s grace in Christ, rather than upon…
Brownson again, arguing that “In baptism, I am given a new identity, into which I am called to grow”: “When we are baptized into the name of Jesus, we are given a new name, the name of Christian. Names are curious things. We rarely choose them for ourselves; they are…
In The Promise of Baptism (Eerdmans, 2007), James Brownson describes faith as 1) acknowledging God’s goodness to me in particular, 2) accepting and receiving the gifts He offers, 3) trusting Him, and 4) being loyal to Him, clinging in allegiance to Him. He neatly ties this to baptism in a…
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