Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
"The faithful use of sacraments, and indeed a fully sacramental view of creation, is vital to the life of the Church. Baptism and the Lord's Supper are rites that directly shape the community and the Body, because they were given by God for that express purpose. A deficient practice of…
Weightlessness is fun. At the beginning of Gravity (2013) , we can see one astronaut dancing the Macarena and another one playing with his jetpack. They like it out there in the space. Apart from zero-gravity they can enjoy beautiful views, and even the silence is likable, although Matt Kowalski…
I recently went to a lunch that is more or less quarterly. About a dozen of us go. It is a lunch held in honor of a retired professor of religion and philosophy. I have been one of his acquaintances for more than 40 years. In his tenure as professor,…
Why Theopolis? Don't we already have seminaries and Bible colleges and other institutions for theological education? Why do we need another one? I get this question now and again. I ask myself this question even more often. What follows is a partial answer. Back in the 1990s, seminaries seemed to…
I think the logic of the Lutheran Reformation can be summarized in one sentence, attributed to Luther himself: "God does not need your good works, but your neighbor does." The first half of that statement is justification by faith . God doesn't need our works to satisfy his justice or…
If you are looking to start a fight with Christians, there is hardly a better subject to do so than the arts. Music, movies, paintings, and literature have provided no small battlegrounds for Christians to war. We are emotionally invested in the arts. A song, a book, or a film…
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Book 6 of Bonaventure’s The Soul’s Journey into God, is about the Trinity. The premise is that good is essentially “self-diffusive,” and thus the highest good must be “most self-diffusive.” This highest self-diffusion is not possible unless it is “actual and intrinsic, substantial and hypostatic, natural and voluntary, free and…
According to Richard of St. Victory ( On the Trinity ), God is the fullness and perfection of all goodness. Plotinus said as much. But then Richard adds that nothing is better than charity, something that Plotinus does not say. For Richard, charity cannot be a solitary enterprise; charity must…
David Chilton points out ( Days of Vengeance , 196-7) points out that seven features of the creation are rendered useless when the sixth seal is opened (Revelation 6:12-14): 1. Earth quakes. 2. The sun turns black. 3. The moon turns to blood. 4. Stars fall from heaven. 5. Heaven…
In the course of her lively challenge to goddess-obsessions among scholars ( In the Wake of the Goddess ), Tikva Frymer-Kensky claims that ancient Israel embodied a proto-feminist sexual polity: “There i nothing disinctively ‘female’ about the way women are portrayed in the Bible, nothing particularly feminine about either their…
When the Lamb opens the sixth seal, the earth and sky collapse (Revelation 6:12-17). The earth shakes, the sky grows dark, the world begins to fall apart. Like Egypt in the time of Moses, the Lamb strikes the earth with plagues and, like the Egyptians, the people of the land…
Michael Solana thinks science fiction is doing us a disservice. Nighmarish predictions of the future aren’t new, but Solana thinks that they’ve become pervasive. A sub-sub-genre has taken over the field, and occupied our imagination. Solana writes, “dystopia has appeared in science fiction from the genre’s inception, but the past…
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