Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Jonah is Paul’s typological opposite. Indeed, in the whole Old Testament, it would be difficult to find a more perfect foil to Paul than Jonah. Whereas Paul crosses the sea to enact God’s saving purposes for the Gentiles, Jonah crosses the sea to avoid bringing Gentiles God’s mercy. For that…
Years ago, I realized that if my children wanted to feel like their house was a home, I needed to be intentional about making our physical shelter a place of spiritual refuge. I began to see the Holy Spirit as the indwelling person of the Trinity—the one who makes His…
When the crowds encircle Christ in Solomon’s Porch during the Festival of Dedication, they charge him: “tell us boldly who you are!” 1 They do not draw-up to him to with excited anticipation as they did earlier in the Gospel, 2 instead they flank him like a gang of wolves.…
1 In Deuteronomy 7:1-5, Moses wrote: When Yahweh your God brings you into the land which you go to possess, and has cast out many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations…
Every Advent witnesses the gruesome reanimation of the voice that whispers “you know , Christmas is just a pagan holiday…” with that sort of conversational ellipsis that does not so much invite further reflection but halts and forecloses it. The claims are several and equally spurious: Jesus wasn’t born on…
Abraham's life in Genesis is a series of trials. He travels hundreds of miles from his family into a new land, flees from a famine into the hands of a king who takes his wife, and after returning, has to rescue his brother from a war. He's involved with two…
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M ary Eberstadt doesn't believe we're in a war of the religious v. the secular. In an adapted excerpt from her newly-released It's Dangerous To Believe: Religious Freedom and Its Enemies , she argues that the battle is between “competing faiths: one in the Good Book, and the other in…
I an Morris puts the discontent with Western elites, reflected most dramatically in Britain's departure from the E.U., in a larger historical perspective. “Throughout history, when things have gone wrong, people have blamed their leaders,” Morris writes. “In the West, things are now going wrong more than they used to,…
I n his long-anticipated and dramatically-completed (read the Preface) Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels , Richard B. Hays devotes a few pages to the parable of the vineyard as recounted in Mark 12. He observes, as every commentator does, that Jesus is the son who is finally sent to…
P lace, writes Robert Pogue Harrison ( The Dominion of the Dead ), is established by a hic jacet : “here lies” the body of my ancestors. To this the gospel poses a direction challenge: When the women show up at the tomb of Jesus, angels tell them hic non…
D on't participate in ( sugkoinoneo ) darkness, Paul says (Ephesians 5:11). Communion with darkness is fruitless, sterile ( akarpos ). Instead of communing with the works of darkness, instead of joining them in one dead flesh, we are to “expose” the works of darkness. Elegcho , “expose,” can also…
I n an essay on “The Evangelical Subversion of Myth,” René Girard examines Matthew 23:27, Jesus's comparison of the Pharisees to whited sepulchers, and Jesus's condemnation of the Pharisees who are sons of those who kill the prophets. On the last passage, Girard cleverly observes that the Pharisees' effort to…
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