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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L ook at a wall, suggests Matthew Crawford ( The World Beyond Your Head ). What color is it? You probably have an answer, a simple one, but when you force yourself to look closely you can see all sorts of variations. The paint is uneven; the old color shows…
P rior to the 1830s, argues JCD Clark ( The Language of Liberty, 1660-1832 ), British political debate was carried on with denominational idioms. Political divides were denominational divides. Political and denominational issues overlapped and intertwined. Political networks, on both sides of the Atlantic, followed denominational pathways. As Clark puts…
I n Revelation, martyrs sing before martyrdom and after martyrdom (Revelation 14-15). Their martyr songs are the war songs of the Lamb, the triumphal chants of those who overcome because they, like the Lamb, do not love life even to death. It doesn't happen only in Revelation. In his comments…
S ummarizing themes from his Love, Sex, and Tragedy , Simon Goldhill highlights the difference between ancient Greek conceptions of eros and Christian and post-Christian conceptions of romantic love. Even the most famous lovers of Greek antiquity, he writes, don’t express themselves with the little nothings that are normal among…
I n a TLS review of several new books on Kierkegaard, Will Rees comments on the therapeutic cruelty of Kierkegaard’s writing. In Sickness Unto Death , “Anti-Climacus explains how, far from an inheritance of birth, the ‘self’ is in fact a vocation – something that one must forge in a…
D evoney Looser says that Jane Austen’s juvenilia is an exercise in burlesque . Not the strip-tease variety, but not so far from that either: “Where a parody sets out to mimic conventions and make us laugh, a burlesque relies ‘on an extravagant incongruity between a subject and its treatment.’…
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