Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In the Bible, all the world is a stage, but like the Tabernacle, that stage moves around a lot. David’s defeat of Goliath can only be fully understood as liturgy fulfilled in history. Liturgy, as a sacrifice of praise, is the step-by-step process of resolving a conflict. It relinquishes all…
Aristotle isn’t fundamentally wrong about friendship, nor is the long tradition that follows him. But you might not gather that by reading some of the more pointed critics of the classical conception of friendship. I think, however, that the classical view is not only viable but taken up and fulfilled…
#13 in Theopolis Papers, Seeking Integration in a Fragmented World It is time for me to “cast off” integration, the way a knitter removes a completed scarf from the needles. I want to bring my quest concerning integration to a decent closure, though my happy quest for reality continues. With…
Below are some notes on a particular sub-theme of Daniel 3, namely the downfall of Babylon’s liturgy. First up, a few words on our text’s literary construction. One of the most conspicuous features of Dan. 3 is its author’s love of lists . Personnel are listed (vs. 2, 3, 27),…
Few things in Scripture, few things in the Christian life, are more familiar than the Lord’s Prayer. Sunday after Sunday, we pray these words together with our brothers and sisters. At home, alone or with our families, we pray this prayer daily, as Jesus taught us (Luke 11:2: “When you…
At the 2019 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America, the denominational delegates considered a number of official overtures (requests for action from the regional parts of the denomination) relating to issues of gender and sexuality. The PCA is conservative. As evidence of this, the assembly passed a resolution…
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Charles Taylor's account of our Secular Age has many virtues. (The following relies on Jamie Smith's summary of Taylor in How (Not) To Be Secular ; page numbers are from Taylor.) Taylor rejects “subtraction” theories of secularization, the notion that secular life was lurking beneath the sacred surface of ritual,…
Max Weber begins his lecture on “Science as a Vocation” by noting the “meaningless” of science, a product of the notion of scientific progress that guides scientific pursuits in the modern world. “E ach of us knows,” Weber writes, “that what he has accomplished will be antiquated in ten, twenty,…
James KA Smith's You Are What You Love is an accessible, penetrating treatment of the liturgical understanding of human existence, of discipleship, and culture that Smith has been developing in a number of his recent books. In this book, he focuses on the specifics of Christian liturgy as a “technology…
Revelation 21-22 gives a vision of an adorned city. Kings bring treasures into the city, but the city isn't just a container for art objects. The city is an art object. The entire civic order is an artistic creation. If the city is an art object, then all of the…
In his summary of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age , James KA Smith observes how apologetics accommodates to the social imaginary of the secular age. Apologetic responses to secularism have too often “conceded the game; that is, the responses to this diminishment of transcendence already accede to it in important…
The vision of the heavenly city at the end of Revelation contains a major oddity: The city descends twice . There are structural reasons for this. The first vision concludes one sequence in Revelation, and the second introduces a final vision. It is the same city, but the vision gives…
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