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Writing

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

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Art

The Artist's Litany

If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. (1 John 1:8) O God the Father, creator of heaven and earth, Alpha and Omega, beginning and end, who inspired Creation with the breath of your nostrils, who placed Adam in the…

by Christian LeithartFebruary 2, 2016
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American Culture

American Sodom

For nearly a half-century, Sodom has been a key symbol in the American culture wars. On the one side, we have an aggressive movement among homosexuals that has first decriminalized homosexual conduct, then to force cultural and legal recognition of homosexuals as a minority and to normalize homosexual behaviors, finally…

by Peter LeithartJanuary 28, 2016
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Biblical Theology

The Meaning of the Mount of Olives

Speaking of the Church, Romans 11:16-17 says, "And if the root be holy, the branches are also. But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, being a wild olive were grafted in among them and became partaker with them of the root of the fatness of the…

by James B. JordanJanuary 26, 2016
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Isaiah

No Sabbath for God

At the end of Isaiah 61, Yahweh's Servant rejoices because the Lord clothes Him with salvation and righteousness. He decks Him like a bridegroom with a garland on His head. He wears jewels like a bride. He is a new bridegroom in a new garden of Eden, a garden of…

by Peter LeithartJanuary 21, 2016
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Biblical Law

Approaching the Torah

Before anything else, a word about “Torah” may be in order. I have been persuaded that “law” is a bad translation of “Torah,” even though it is evident that what is called “Torah” does have commandments, statutes, and ordinances in abundance. Why not “law?” “Law” as a translation for “Torah”…

by Ralph Allan SmithJanuary 19, 2016
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Biblical Horizons

Jane Austen, Pundit

Few novelists seem as innocent of the temptation to punditry as Jane Austen. Though living through a period that witnessed the birth of an independent United States, the French Revolution and the Terror, the Napoleonic wars and the rise of revolutionary romanticism, and the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution, she…

by Peter LeithartJanuary 14, 2016

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Dying for others

Jesus lays down His life for His friends. He is a martyr, a witness to death. His death is glorious. In his The Atonement: The Origins of the Doctrine in the New Testament , Martin Hengel wonders where that notion comes from. It doesn’t seem to come from the Old…

April 9, 2013
Politics

Just War, Restrained War

Roland Bainton divided Christian perspectives on war into three categories - pacifist, just war, and crusade. James Turner Johnson ( Just war tradition and the restraint of war: A moral and historical inquiry ) does not think Bainton’s categories are helpful. For starters, the crusaders considered their wars to be…

April 8, 2013

Monopoly science

It’s often lamented that science has been politicized. John Brooke ( Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives ) points out that politics does not represent a fall from some pure original science but the point of modern science from the outset: “Science was respected not simply for its results but…

April 8, 2013

Materialist memes

Richard Dawkins has famously proposed that cultural habits are passed on through “memes”: “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches . . . . Memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad…

April 8, 2013

Internal creativity

Rupert Sheldrake thinks science and religion overlap, but he is not an advocate of Intelligent Design. ID assumes a a mechanistic metaphor of the world: “Humans design machines, buildings and works of art. In a similar way the God of mechanistic theology, or the Intelligent Designer, is supposed to have…

April 8, 2013

Christian Imperialism

Rich Bledsoe examines the pointlessness of today’s democratic capitalism and argues for the political and cultural necessity of acknowledging Jesus as Emperor at the Trinity House site.

April 8, 2013

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