Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I am making a new rule in our house! We are actually kind of skimpy on the house rules. I try very hard to keep things simple: love God, love others, be joyful. It’s not complicated to avoid discipline here. But I have found myself repeating this new rule over…
Click HERE for Part 2 The voice of Jesus transforms and changes Mary when she hears him speak her name. This is her last “turning.” So also the woman in the Song of Songs longs to hear the voice of her beloved. Let me see your face, let me hear…
Click HERE for Part 1. The details of this story call the attentive reader back to the drama of Solomon’s Song of Songs. And the Song of Song’s alludes to, ties us into the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden and the promise of a coming Messiah that…
“The course was a paradigm shift for me,” said Jonathan Sedlak, a Milwaukee electrical contractor who attended Theopolis’s course on Revelation. “I am left with a book that is far more practical than it has ever seemed before.” Jonathan Anderson of Louisville, Kentucky found the course “refreshing.” “I finished with…
“It is only by participation in a rational, practice-based community that one becomes rational.” – Alasdair MacIntyre It may be perfectly clear to a chef why adding unsifted powdered sugar to a hot frosting is a bad idea. But for an amateur cook, this may be the kind of rule…
On a fresco in a chapel in Padua, Italy, there is a famous painting depicting the dramatic post-resurrection scene in John 20 with Mary and Jesus outside of the garden tomb. Giotto di Bondone painted it in the early 14th century. Jesus is striding from the tomb with a victor’s…
Showing page 156 of 309
Showing page 2 of 43
At the heart of Richard Beck’s brilliant Unclean are two related mistakes that amount to the same mistake. The first has to do with sacrifice. He begins from Jesus’ claim in Matthew 9 that God desires “mercy, not sacrifice.” The two are not logically opposed, nor are they opposed situationally.…
Ernest Becker argued that the “self” is not limited to the body but extends to “the things in which our true feelings are located”: “A person literally projects or throws himself out of the body, anywhere at all. As the great Williams James put it almost 80 years ago: A…
Richard Beck describes love as the overcoming of boundaries, and in defending that description deals with the concern of psychologists for establishing “healthy boundaries” ( Unclean , 129-30). Drawing on Charles Taylor’s analysis of the modern self, he argues: “Modernity can talk about ‘healthy relationships’ and make numerous recommendations about…
One of the heads of the beast of Revelation 13 is slain and then healed. The term ( sphazo ) is the same as that used for the Lamb (5:6, 9, 12) and for the saints (6:9). The Lamb was slain and then “healed” in the resurrection and ascension. When…
Newt Gingrich and Vince Haley suggest that the subpoena of sermons and other communications from Houston pastors is an attempt to exploit Justice Kennedy’s arguments in Windsor : “there is now an established and successful political and constitutional strategy to paint the protection of traditional moral values - and opposition…
Scholastic and exegetical theology are sometimes contrasted. Scholastics reason logically from axioms; exegetical theologians go wherever the text takes ‘em. While the contrast may have some rough truth to it, it’s never been an absolute one, and can be misleading. Scholastics deal with biblical texts. More importantly, exegetes have to…
Showing page 508 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
