Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I've pastored a very rural church for well over a decade. Our town has about 1,000 people and will never grow until Jesus returns. 38 people attend our worship on Sundays. Here's a quick list of what we’ve done to grow our church, and what I’ve done to survive pastorally.…
Thanks for sharing so honestly about your current crisis of creativity. I totally understand and relate to that; it’s happened many times in my musical life thus far, and I’ve begun to accept it as a normal rhythm of the creative process. I actually went through a serious dry spell…
The Broken Stones of Israel At Sinai, the tablets of the Law of Moses were broken and restored. The Old Testament is a history of “new covenants,” including that promised in Jeremiah and fulfilled in Zechariah. Ultimately, the vertical Oath and the horizontal Sanctions met in the death of Jesus…
Woe to the sinful nation. Woe to those who enlarge their estates and build their portfolios. Woe to the drunks. Woe to those who call evil good and good evil. Woe to the proud who are wise in their own eyes. Woe to Congressmen who pass unjust laws and to…
The interpretation of Romans 7:7-25 is notoriously difficult. Good scholars disagree on many aspects of the passage, but the central interpretative difficulty concerns the identity of the “I.” Is Paul referring to himself? Is Paul referring to himself pre- or post-conversion? Does the “I” refer to Adam? Is the “I”…
You board the Metra train at Arlington Heights station one afternoon, heading to downtown Chicago for some sight-seeing. As the train departs from the station, a man in jeans, a striped t-shirt, and a Kansas City Royals baseball cap enters your train car, and begins asking to see each passenger’s…
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David Cheal ( The Gift Economy ) offers a deft critique of Mauss’s and C.A. Gregory’s theories of gift. The central rebuttal is to point to the fairly obvious fact that giving continues to occupy a large place in modern societies. Gift-giving is big business, as that pile of Christmas…
When it first appeared, Tarkovsky’s Stalker: A Film by Andrei Tarkovsky was seen as a parable of totalitarian ruin. Since the curtain came down, it has a more universal reach. David Thomson ( “Have You Seen . . . ?”: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films , 822) sees in…
What sets Western economies apart, Hernando de Soto argued in The Mystery of Capital , is not sheer physical stuff. One can have a lot of stuff without having capital. What makes it productive as capital are two “non-economic” factors. The first is imagination: “Capital, like energy, is a dormant…
A couple of vignettes from Paul Johnson’s Darwin: Portrait of a Genius , which is vintage Johnson. Darwin’s paternal grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, who died several years before Charles was born was a well-known physician who filled his off hours with studies of poetry and science. His off hours included the…
I have been reading James Jordan and Peter Leithart since I was a wide-eyed Baptist seminary student in the late 80’s and early 90’s. I never cease to benefit from Leithart’s and Jordan’s writings and lectures. While as a Baptist I land differently on certain issues, I always know it…
Absolute religious freedom is impossible, argues Winnifred Fallers Sullivan in her 2007 The Impossibility of Religious Freedom , an analysis of Warner v. Boca Raton , which led to the banning of interreligious religious symbols from a cemetery in the Florida town. Religious freedom always founders on the issue of…
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