Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
For many people Christmas comes on December 25 and is over December 26. The tree is taken down along with the lights and the other decorations, and everyone begins setting the house in order for the new year. No more Christmas hymns. No more celebrations (well, until New Year’s Eve).…
The Ascension and the Incarnation should not be disconnected in our Christmas thinking or celebrations. As N.T. Wright notes, the ascension is "a central and vital feature without which all sorts of other things start to go demonstrably wrong. . . . where the ascension has been ignored or misunderstood,…
“In the Word was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness.” Thus John describes the incarnation of the Son. He comes as the living and life-giving light of the world. That’s good news. In the beginning, God spoke and light shone…
Christmas is all about Jesus. The angels announce Jesus’ birth, shepherds and wise men come to see Jesus, Herod wants to kill Jesus. We occasionally think of the Father who sent the Son, but we keep returning to the Son made flesh in Bethlehem’s manger. Meanwhile, as always, the Spirit…
Christmas is about many things, but one of the chief things revealed in the gospel of Christmas is the humility of God. We don't often think of humility as an attribute of God. If God is glorious and exalted, we think, He must be haughty and proud and self-centered. We…
John famously begins his Gospel with a piece of theology: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Matthew starts with a genealogy. John celebrates Advent with a hymn, Matthew with a list. For John, Jesus is the Word of creation…
Showing page 120 of 309
Showing page 2 of 43
After listing 22 descriptive terms for the self (including stressed, self-alienated, paranoid, bulimic), Kenneth Gergen notes that “they are all terms of mental deficit. They discredit the individual, drawing attention to problems, shortcomings, or incapacities. To put it more broadly, the vocabulary of human deficit has undergone enormous expansion within…
Montaigne wrote in his essay on the education of children, “The boy we would breed has a great deal less time to spare; he owes but the first fifteen or sixteen years of his life to education; the remainder is due to action. Let us, therefore, employ that short time…
Postmodernity is from one angle modernity coming to self-consciousness. Managerialism is as much at the heart of modernity as of postmodernity, but postmoderns know they are being managed. As a result, management is always shot through with irony. How can we take the wizard seriously after the curtain has been…
David Lyon’s little book, Postmodernity, provides an excellent introduction to the sociological, technological, and political contexts in which postmodern thought has arisen. He is cautious about inflating claims about a “postmodern” condition or the coming of a “new society,” but attempts to isolate those features of contemporary life that have…
INTRODUCTION As many critics have pointed out, Act 2 of Hamlet focuses on the efforts of both the “mighty opposites” - Hamlet and Claudius - to spy out the intentions and plans of the other. Thus begins the process of inserting various mediators between the two, all of whom end…
Rikki Watts offers some other dimensions to the quotation from Mark 1:1. He notes that Mark is quoting not only from Isaiah 40, but also from Exodus 23 and Malachi 3, and shows how these three texts overlay each other in Mark’s presentation. Exodus 23 is a warning to Israel…
Showing page 1888 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
