Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Along His journey to Jerusalem, Jesus stops frequently to have meals, three times with Pharisees (7:37-50; 11:37-54; 14:1-35). Meals were central to Jesus’ ministry. He comes “eating and drinking” (Luke 7:34). While His meals are not just for refreshment, they are opportunities for teaching the protocols of the kingdom. Meals…
Time as a realm of participation can be difficult for us imaginatively to grasp. While music is a profoundly temporal art, exploring the medium of time like no other, most of our temporal experience seems decidedly unmusical in character, disjointed and unorchestrated. The form in which we naturally discover time…
John devotes much attention to Jesus’ burial clothes. He tells us that Nicodemus brought about a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes to spice Jesus body, and that He was bound in linen wrappings. We find out that His body and His head were wrapped separately. (John 19:39-40; 20:6-7). When…
Thinking about time in terms of music also helps us to appreciate its unity and inner relations. Henri Bergson observes our cultural habit of dividing time into discrete moments, and conceiving of these as if akin to objects in a spatial succession. [1] Against such a notion, Bergson argues for…
As we attend to these and other aspects of music’s temporality, Begbie suggests, we will find means by which to resist some of our habitual modern ways of conceptualizing time, most especially our tendency to conceive of time as if it were a homogeneous set of technologically quantifiable units laid…
The Hidden Dimension In many fields of scientific study, the apparent complications and contradictions are dispelled once the internal logic is perceived. Biblical hermeneutics is no different, since the author of Creation is the Author of the Word. The Bible’s literary labyrinth radiates organically from an algorithm so simple it…
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Why do we baptize babies? This seems to many Christians, especially in America, like a strange tradition, a leftover of the formalism and nominal Christianity of the medieval Roman Catholic church. And even to many of us who believe we should baptize our babies, it seems like a somewhat extraneous…
Suppose I told you that Trinity Reformed Church had been asked to perform a choir concert this morning? Would you be prepared? Or would it be like one of those dreams where you find yourself taking a test without studying, or realizing suddenly that you?ve arrived at church in your…
CONTRASTING MINDSETS, Romans 8:5-13 Paul has announced that through the work of Father, Son and Spirit, we who are in Christ have been set free from Sin and Death, and are now capable of keeping the requirement of the Law. Torah aimed at giving life; but that purpose cannot not…
In the Spring issue of the American Scholar, William Deresiewicz discusses the sexualization of dance during the twelve years he write dance criticism for various publications: “For one thing, dancers have been wearing less and less. Sometimes they don’t wear anythng at all, though this nudity or semi-nudity almost never…
Notes on Thomas Aquinas on The Effects of Grace, ST I-II, q. 113. 1) Article 1: Justification of the ungodly consists in the remission of sins, Aquinas argues, over against the claim that justification must involve some movement toward justice and that the remission of sins is not a movement.…
Some notes on Augustine?s Treatise on the Spirit and the Letter . 1) Augustine treats ?letter?Ein 2 Corinthians as a reference to the law itself, which kills. The law kills, however, in the absence of the Spirit: ?the letter of the law, which teaches us not to commit sin, kills,…
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