Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The Paradosis Center at John Brown University in Siloam Spring, Arkansas, put on its first conference last week, it was a remarkable event. It was an ecumenical conference including Orthodox (John Behr, Edith Humphrey, others), Catholic (Rusty Reno, Michael Root, others), and Evangelical (Timothy George, David Lyle Jeffrey). Unusually for…
Naphtali Meshel observes in his new The "Grammar" of Sacrifice that scholars have been talking for decades about the "grammatical" character of ritual and sacrifice in general, but have never actually analyzed a specific ritual or sacrificial system grammatically. Some even talk about a "universal grammar" of sacrifice "even though…
Some Christians are rather breezy about the problem of evil. We shouldn't be. Do I need to remind you of the grisly beheadings that have taken place over the past few weeks? Do I need to remind you of the blood of innocents that’s been spilled in our own country?…
Have you ever been to a wedding where the heavens opened and a voice declared the couple “husband and wife”? Few of us have. Beautiful as they are, most marriages are quite mundane. Yet when Jesus talks about marriage, He describes it as something that God does: “What God has…
Jesus is the last and greatest of the Prophets. He is the Prophet that Moses predicted (Deuteronomy 18). That means He gives the final word, brings the blueprints for the final temple, speaks the final world into existence, and has complete and permanent access to the divine court, where He…
Paul stands against those who are “troubling” or “disturbing” the Galatians churches ( tarasso ; 1:7; also in 5:10). The reference seems to be two great troublers from the Old Testament. First, Achan is described as a “troubler” for the problems he causes in the aftermath of the battle at…
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J ean-Louis Chretien begins his Hand to Hand with a series of meditations on the story of Jacob wrestling with God, and artistic representations of that episode. He quotes Francois de Sales, who wrote: “Our Lord may turn us and sweep us round to the left or to the right;…
I n Hand to Hand , Jean-Louis Chretien meditates on silence in painting. He doesn't simply mean that painting is a visual rather than an audible art. Instead, he argues that paintings must not only be viewed but listened to: “To say that painting is silent is to say that…
“G iving oneself up to sleep can constitute the worst of abandonments,” writes Jean-Louis Chretien ( Hand to Hand ), “wherein we abandon another person to his solitude and his distress by withdrawing ourselves from the common world and from our community with him. Our eyelids close upon our weary…
P aul Collier devotes a long, provocative, stimulating TLS review to a sketch of a “new pragmatism.” The review doubles as an essay on the “future of capitalism.” Along the way, Collier discusses the problems of multiculturalism and gives qualified endorsement to nationalism. Multiculturalism must be “bounded,” partly because Western…
D avid I. Smith and Susan M. Felch ( Teaching and Christian Imagination ) want to rehabilitate the symbolism of “gardening” as a model of education. It does require rehabilitation, not least because of Rousseau, who wrote: “God makes all things good. . . . [but] man meddles with them…
D avid Smith and Susan Felch devote several pages of their Teaching and Christian Imagination (129–134) to a summary of John Amos Comenius's seventeenth-century treatise on education, Great Didactic . Comenius starts where humanity starts, with Eden's garden, and reflects that the garden is not only man's original location but…
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