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Writing

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

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Medicine

Fighting the Beast

Peter Leithart recently wrote on his blog about the verse from Revelation 13, "Who is able to wage war with the beast?" and I could hardly help but take special notice. These were exactly the words l had had echoing about in my own head recently. Of course the answer…

by Richard BledsoeDecember 4, 2014
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American Politics

Laughing Along with Jon Stewart

I confess to mixed feelings about Jon Stewart. There’s a great deal about his work that I don’t particularly like. I don’t like his profanity, the worst of which is mercifully bleeped out before it makes it onto the YouTube clips that are my main source of snippets. I certainly…

by Steve JefferyDecember 2, 2014
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Homosexuality

The Marriage Pledge: A View from Dixie

The Marriage Pledge , authored by Ephraim Radner and Christopher Seitz and unveiled by First Things editor R. R. Reno, argues that the time has come for Christian pastors to rend themselves away from civil marriage. The Pledge argues that the fact that many states are now allowing same sex…

by Rich LuskDecember 1, 2014
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Psalms

Psalm 28 Commentary

Psalm 28 has an overall rhetorical structure that looks like this: lines 1-16, prayer to Yahweh lines 17-20, talk about the wicked lines 21-27, talk about Yahweh (center of psalm) lines 28-29, talk about the anointed people lines 30-33, prayer to Yahweh As is so often the case, the enemies…

by James B. JordanNovember 26, 2014
tools
Culture

Culture

A river arises in Eden, flows through the sanctuary-garden, and waters the world downstream. A spring springs up from beneath the throne of God in the temple, rushes over the threshold, and then out to the land, toward the Sea of Salt, where it empties and turns brackish water sweet.…

by Peter LeithartNovember 25, 2014
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Sexuality

Sex Trafficking and the Devil

On Wednesday evening, November 19, Justin Holcomb, Canon for Vocations in the Episcopal Diocese of South Florida and co-founder of REST (Real Escape from the Sex Trade) was a guest of the Theopolis Institute for a lecture on sex trafficking, given at Covenant Presbyterian Church, Birmingham. Dr. Holcomb's lecture began…

by TheopolisNovember 20, 2014

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Stand-up Anthropology

At the 1993 conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the Commonwealth, Marshall Sahlins was invited to provide “after-dinner entertainment.” His anthropological stand-up routine has been published as Waiting for Foucault, Still , most recently in 2002 by Sahlins’s own Prickly Paradigm Press. Sahlins thinks that atheism is the…

March 28, 2014

Theopoetic

Amos Wilder’s Theopoetic , recently reprinted in Wipf & Stock’s Amos Wilder LIbrary, is a plea for a renewal of imagination, written with the taut elegance of a poet. Writing in 1976, Wilder saw himself fighting on two fronts - against the utilitarian spirit of American Protestantism on the one…

March 28, 2014

Fruitful Cut

Howard Eilberg-Schwartz ( The Savage in Judaism ) traces most every form of impurity in ancient Israel back to issues of fertility. I don’t buy that overall, and he recognizes that it can’t cover everything (see his discussion of menstruation. 177-94, where he uncovers several overlapping schemas). The argument works…

March 28, 2014

Open and Shut

Jesus has the key of David (Revelation 3:7), which allows him to open and shut. The statement is chiastic: A. who opens B. and no one shuts B’. and shuts A’. and no one opens. The sentence’s structure mimics the sentence’s content: It speaks of “opening” at the “open ends,”…

March 27, 2014

Materialism in Defense of Faith

In a dense paragraph, Milbank (“Theology Without Substance, Part 1,” Journal of Literature and Theology , 1988) draws on Paolo Rossi’s Dark Abyss of Time describes how English and Neopolitan writers put Spinoza, Hobbes, and de Lapeyrere to work in defense of orthodoxy - even in defense of Scripture and…

March 27, 2014

Animals in Israel

Drawing from Robertson Smith, Howard Eilberg-Schwartz lists numerous biblical characters with animal names ( The Savage in Judaism , 116): Eglon means calf, Nahash is a serpent, Oreb is Raven and Ze’eb is a wolf. Seir the Horite has Shobal (young lion), Zibeon (hyena), Anah (wild ass), Dishon (antelope). Leah…

March 27, 2014

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