Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
“What’s the fastest route” he asks me as we quickly come to a stop behind a sea of red brake lights. I pull out my phone and map all the options. Every way is red with traffic backed up. Deep down I must be a small town girl because traffic…
Dear Friend of Theopolis, I have signed a stack of documents in the years since we started Theopolis, but my heart jumped a few beats as I looked at the thick lease contract. “This is real,” I thought. “This makes it really real.” Theopolis has been real for nearly three…
In the Edenic world of Perelandra, from C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, Ransom notices something about how the Green Lady treats the animals: [1] “There was in her face an authority, in her caresses a condescension, [2] which by taking seriously the inferiority of her adorers made them somehow less inferior…
In my previous two articles, I argued for the significance of the fact that baptism addresses our bodies in their objectivity. In the body, the self has an existence that runs deeper than our consciousness, decision, self-expression, and action. In washing our passive bodies, baptism seals us with an anticipatory…
Judah is a sinful nation, weighed down with iniquity. They are not the seed of Abraham, but the seed of iniquity. Their worship is abominable to Yahweh, because their hands are covered with innocent blood. They have not done good, or sought justice, or reproved the ruthless, or defended the…
Although we tend to define ourselves by our subjectivity —our perceptions, thoughts, feelings, decisions, actions—we are frequently forgetful of the objectivity of the self as body, the reality of the self that underlies and precedes all of our subjectivity. The body is the site of our ‘givenness’, where we are…
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Masudi’s 10th-century Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems gives the history of the world from Eden to the author’s own time. His account of early humanity is clearly drawn partly from Genesis, but other accounts are thoroughly mixed in. When God determined to create Adam as a “lieutenant on…
In his wise, wide-ranging contribution to Recent Developments in Trinitarian Theology , Christoph Schwobel argues that trinitarian theology necessitates a revision of metaphysical assumptions. “It is,” he writes, “one of the most significant discoveries of the classical disputes of trinitarian doctrine in the early church that the straightforward application of…
In his breezy review of Madonna’s career in Fame in the 20th Century , Clive James captures Madonna’s genius for self-reinvention. She “was called Madonna Louise Ciccone, but in her burning ambition for universal fame she didn’t want to rule out the large section of her potential audience that might…
The Ishmaelites who carry Joseph to Egypt are carrying “aromatic gum, balm, and myrrh” with them (Genesis 37:25), which are among the goods of the land that Jacob later sends to Vizier Joseph, not knowing he’s Joseph (cf. Genesis 43:11). This has several layers of meaning. As Jacob Hanby, a…
James Gleick’s NYTBR review of Vikram Chandra’s Geek Sublime places the book in the context of CP Snow’s “two cultures.” As programmer-turned novelist, Chandra crosses the cultures, and his book aspires, Gleick says, “to look deeply, and with great subtlety, into the connections and tensions between the worlds - the…
Justin Marozzi’s recently released Baghdad vividly recounts the glory and anguish of a city that was, for several centuries, considered the “most prosperous city in the world.” It’s name has been variously translated as “Gift of God” or “Founded by God.” Founded by the Abbasid Caliph Mansur in the eighth…
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