Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
There’s something about joy that is infectious. And occasionally, we all have the opportunity to be in someone’s presence who is so happily engaged in their work, so joyous in their pursuits, that we want to learn from them. We want to know where that joy comes from and attain…
Jesus has told us that He intends all nations to be discipled. Nations. Not just individuals. All nations as theocracies. That being the case, the Church exists for the life of the world. Being baptized is not only a matter of becoming part of a new family, it is also…
Harold Bloom’s essay on Macbeth includes the kind of penetrating insights that make Bloom the great Shakespearean scholar that he is, but it also includes his typical and intense anti-Christian bias. “If Lear was pre-Christian, then Macbeth is weirdly post-Christian. There are, as we have seen, Christian intimations that haunt…
Revelation 16 is a day of atonement text. The tabernacle of the testimony has been opened (15:5). The angels who receive the bowls are clothed in linen (15:6), the clothing of the high priest when he goes into the sanctuary on the day of atonement (Leviticus 16:4). The temple is…
From time to time, when I’ve lectured on how to read the Bible, I’ve used art-music as one example thereof. When we listen to a simple folk song, we hear the same melody over and over again, but this is not how composers write "high" music. Let me amplify. A…
"For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea-monster, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth" (Matthew 12:40). Some reflections on Jonah’s Big Fish have led to the following essay. Let me…
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Revelation seems to be the province of fundamentalists, dispensationalists, popapocalyptics. It's far too cartoonish, stark, violent, demanding to be at home in the mainline. Craig Koester ( Revelation and the End of All Things ) points out that mainline churches actually hear very little of the Apocalypse in church. The…
Yahweh brings a devastating judgment on His own people and on Edom, slaughtering and destroying them. He empties the land of Edom, and fills their cities with wild animals (Isaiah 34-35). What has this got to do with us? Everything. What Isaiah depicts is a figure of the gospel story.…
God only speaks twice directly to the reader in Revelation, Craig Koester points out ( Revelation and the End of All Things , 51). He says the same thing both times: “I am the Alpha and the Omega . . . who is and who was and who comes, the…
You get the gist of Rajan Menon's argument from the title of his forthcoming book: The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention . The position he opposes is based on the assumption that the end of the Cold War fundamentally altered geopolitical conditions, and that our contemporary interconnected world is converging toward…
Janine Barchas ( Matters of Fact in Jane Austen ) says that Austen's world had a nascent celebrity culture. Baronets were well known; court scandals made news. There was an 18th-century equivalent of the National Inquirer and paparazzi. Austen knew this world, and she makes references to it in her…
In The Myth of Liberalism , John Safranek observes that recent Supreme Court decisions identify freedom with autonomy: “both restrain the government from interfering with an individual's personal and self-defining decisions” (109). As the majority said in Casey , the right to self-definition is “at the heart of liberty,” such…
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