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Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.

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The Lady and Her Jewels: An Epiphany Meditation

And a great portent appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars; she was with child and she cried out in her pangs of birth, in anguish for delivery (Revelation 12:1-2). Then Joshua spoke…

by Richard BledsoeJanuary 6, 2015
extreme-unction
Anointing

Fattening Our Suffering

In his post asking Ought we Anoint the Dying? Peter Leithart makes an excellent and important point about our suffering as members of Christ. However, he only parenthetically mentions that the verb in question in James 5 is not chrio but aleipho . By assuming that these words are interchangeable,…

by Robert MaddoxDecember 30, 2014
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James

Death as Frenemy

We spend a lot of time in the church talking about what it means to live like a Christian. But what does it mean to die like a Christian? If we are to follow Christ in life, what does it mean for us to follow him in death as well?…

by Rich LuskDecember 23, 2014
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Literature

Was Shakespeare A Christian?

How would one go about answering the question posed by my title? That depends on what the question means. Obviously, different definitions of the question would require different approaches to an answer. Right off hand, I can think of at least three possible — though not necessarily mutually exclusive —…

by Ralph Allan SmithDecember 23, 2014
day-2-ferguson-protests-nationwide
American Culture

Phobophobia

In recent weeks and months, we have seen events that are not the event. The drama around these events is not the events themselves, but the anxiety about the events, and then even the anxiety about the anxiety about the events. That is the real event. The events in Ferguson,…

by Richard BledsoeDecember 22, 2014
anointing-david
Anointing

Ought We Anoint the Dying?

Anointing the sick, including the dying, is one of the traditional seven sacraments of the Catholic Church. The Reformers denied that the rite qualified as a sacrament. Formally, this was because anointing did not have a direct authorization from Jesus; more theologically, it was not one of the marks that…

by Peter LeithartDecember 18, 2014

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Tragic Japan

R. Taggart Murphy has been writing on Japanese politics, business and economics for a long time, but the rest of the world has lost interest. What fascinates, he says, is Japanese culture - the fashions, the anime, the weirdness of a country where you can pay 7000 yen to be…

September 8, 2014

Baysiders

Senator Robert Kennedy was shot on June 5, 1968. The next day, Veronica Lueken of Bayside, New York, was praying to St. Therese of Lisieux for Kennedy when she was surrounded by the fragrance of roses. Over the next months, she began writing poetry that she later attributed to St.…

September 8, 2014

Good Land

Over at the Trinity House site , I analyze the sevenfold description of Israel’s “good land” in Deuteronomy 8.

September 8, 2014
Homosexuality

Unnatural?

In a 2010 article in the Journal for the Society of Christian Ethics , natural law theorist Jean Porter probed the question of same-sex marriage, and concluded that there were no objections in natural law to same-sex sex or to same-sex marriage as such. The article is excerpted here .…

September 6, 2014

Testimony

Epistemology has often been viewed as a debate between raitonalists and empiricists. Descartes set certainty as the gold standard of knowledge, and argued from doubt to conclusions that he considered indubitable. Empiricists insist that our senses are capable of giving us reliable knowledge of the world, and in many cases…

September 6, 2014

More Than Grammar

Matthew Easter summarizes the back-and-forth of the arguments in the debate over pistis Christou. It’s a careful, judicious summary, and his conclusion seems irrefutable: The debate won’t be resolved by grammar alone, since “interpreters resort either intentionally or unintentionally to their larger models for reading Paul that are already in…

September 5, 2014

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