Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Where do we go from here? Depending on one’s perspective, the American story can plausibly be interpreted in different ways. Looked at from past to present , we can see a great deal of continuity from medieval Christendom and the Reformation to America’s founding. The War for Independence, after all,…
Click HERE for Part 1 Civic Religion: American or Christian? We have already traced out the basic contours of the shift in America from an ecclesiocentric, theocratic social order to a secular one. Building on Locke and Hobbes, the Enlightenment accomplished an astonishing coup of Christendom. That victory for the…
Author’s Introductory Note: Engaging in broad historical interpretation as I am about to do is always risky. Necessarily, one “stylizes” history by simplifying, over generalizing, and stereotyping. But the narrative qualities of history are not simply due to the imposition of human rationality upon brute facts; rather history is always…
A. Repentance to life involves endeavoring to believe real hard that you’re saved. reject infant baptism. stop watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. walk with God in all the ways of his commandments. B. What is necessary so that no sinner may expect to be forgiven unless he does it? Only…
The machine works mechanically and it is flawless. Slander/libel a group of Presbyterian ministers as “Romanist” because robes and James 2 are no worse than praying to Mary or relying on purgatory to pay for unconfessed sins. Drive off anyone who disagrees. Of that number, there may be a tiny…
If we take as a starting point the Tribal / Monarchical / Empire model, we can then add to it the Late Empire Phase. The particular ‘marker sin’ of Empire is false intermarriage, which signifies pluralism and syncretism. Empires by definition are “cosmopolitan” dominated by cities, high culture, many cultures,…
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I was honored to serve as guest editor of the Fall 2012 edition of Comment magazine, a publication of the Canadian think tank Cardus. The issue focuses on the “Word of God in the City of Man,” and includes articles by James Payton, Al Wolters, Richard Mouw, Marilynne Robinson, Daniel…
Next door on the main First Things site ( www.firstthings.com ), I summarize some recent revisionist scholarship on the origins of Islam.
There aren’t many contemporary Reformed theologians whose writings I find more stimulating and insightful than Peter Leithart and Jim Jordan. On everything from biblical commentary to historical theology, from poetry to politics, from music and liturgics to eschatology and hermeneutics, the light of the gospel shines forth in fresh and…
The December 20 edition of the NYRB has some arresting photos of bronze statues in a London Royal Academy exhibit, made all the more impressive by the reviewer Andrew Butterfield’s description of the process of bronze sculpture: “Bronze is very different from most materials of sculpture. The other substances commonly…
Poor Camille Paglia. She’s worked herself into a froth. Writing in The Hollywood Reporter , she complains s(n)eeringly that the latest crop of women stars have betrayed feminism. With Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, and their crowd of new power women, we’re back “to the demure girly-girl days of the white-bread…
“None of our Western [economic] distinctions was completely absent in antiquity,” writes Sitta van Reden near the end of her Exchange in Ancient Greece (218). Yet, because of a different configuration of society the distinctions we take for granted were not so ingrained: “Rigid status boundaries between citizens and outsiders,…
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