Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I grew up in the 1950s. This was before the "Sixties" and the democratization, informalization, and general cheapening of the church and her worship. Ministers were Father Donovan, Pastor Eckhart, Reverend MacPherson, Mister (Episcopal) Parker, and Brother Smith. Liturgical speech was high language, sounding kind of like the King James…
Metaphor exerts a surprisingly powerful influence within our thinking. Although it is easily dismissed as little more than a figure of speech, when we attend more closely to the ways in which we use it, metaphor’s importance swiftly becomes more apparent. Although many of our metaphors have become quite invisible…
What is a tree, scientifically speaking? A mere googling gives the following answer: “a woody perennial plant, typically having a single stem or trunk growing to a considerable height and bearing lateral branches at some distance from the ground.” We can increase detail by describing its family, genus, species and…
The majority of Western evangelical Christians rarely, if ever, fast as a form of spiritual discipline. In our culture, fasting is more connected with dieting than worship, the other side of our deeply ambiguous fascination with food. Food is everywhere. We eat more than ever before, at greater speed, and…
A Grammar of Creation An understanding of the visual-musical language of the Bible must begin with Genesis 1. This is fortunate, because when explaining biblical types to academics, as opposed to children, one is repeatedly forced to start from scratch. From birth, a healthy child is attuned to rhythm and…
In an inverse Eden, a land laid waste, one works alone tending the trash. There are none like him in all the earth, inquisitive, playful and most drawn to those mysterious, dancing bipedal creatures who lost earth and left it to go wandering the vast wilderness of space. Humans have…
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Christmas gifts should be an occasion for joy, but it’s not necessarily so. Gifts also produce discontent, envy, anger, resentment, and strife. You didn’t get what you wanted; someone else’s gift is bigger and better. And so on and on. In this season of giving, we need to remember the…
Ecclesiastes 3:12-13: There is nothing better than to rejoice and to do good in one’s lifetime; moreover that every man who eats and drinks sees good in all his labor – it is the gift of God. Vapor of vapors, says the preacher. All is vapor. Ecclesiastes reminds us that…
This piece was originally published at the Credenda/Agenda web site in 2009. Being in a Grinchy mood and of a generally Grinchy disposition, I thought it worth re-presenting. Several years ago, when The Passion of the Christ was making headlines, I realized that N. T. Wright has spoiled every Jesus…
At the NYRB web site, Ian Johnson summarizes the changing relations between the Chinese government and the church. He ends with this account of the Huanan church: “A decade ago, authorities in China smashed one of the world’s biggest charismatic Christian churches, the 500,000-member South China (Huanan) Church, sending its…
There are more than two brands, but I’m restricting myself to two. On the one hand there are the careful, balanced assessments of some writer or a collection of writers. These aim to clarify the aims and actual opinions of thinkers of the past. They rebut misinterpretations and misconstruals. Descartes…
Self-help books are easy to mock. Too easy. But this one is too hard to resist. In 2008, Thomas Nelson put out Thank You Power: Making the Science of Gratitude Work for You by Deborah Norville. I have not read the book. From the Table of Contents, it looks to…
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