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Writing

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

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Ezra

Ezra: The Aaronic Rest-Giver

If you’re a preacher looking for good commentaries on Ezra, you’ll struggle. Certainly to find ones that wrestle in good detail with the text. And certainly ones that don’t cost you an arm and a leg. There’s a good bit more for Nehemiah, which is odd, as the two are…

by Rhys LavertyJune 8, 2021
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1 John

1 John in Community

Quick thought experiment: try to pretend you’ve never read 1 John before. Read 1:1-6. Go ahead; I’ll wait. Now, on to v. 7: “But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with ______….” What word would you expect in that blank, based…

by Tim NicholsJune 1, 2021
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Hermeneutics

Spending Time with Noah: Reflections on Prepositions in the Flood Narrative

In my work as a Bible translator, I was recently checking our translation team’s draft of Genesis 8:8, which says of Noah (translating the Hebrew quite literally): And he sent out the dove from with him to see: had the waters lessened from upon the face of the ground? Part…

by Josh JensenMay 25, 2021
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Philosophy

Steven Weinberg Destroyed My Faith

Just in case a reader may not know Weinberg, he is a theoretical physicist and the winner of the Nobel prize in physics in 1979, as well as countless other prizes for his research. He is also a prolific, lucid, and captivating writer. If you want to read something on…

by Ralph Allan SmithMay 18, 2021
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Colossians

Reconciliation in Colossians 1:20

Colossians 1:15-20 is a famous passage in Paul’s epistles because it is a succinct and powerful poem. It appears even to have been a hymn. Given the uniquely Pauline language — “reconciliation” is a term used only by Paul — it should not seem odd to attribute the poem/hymn to…

by Ralph Allan SmithMay 11, 2021
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Movies

Terror of Knowing Myself

Stalker (1979) is a film by Andrei Tarkovsky based on Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers. It shows a day from the life of a stalker, a man who enters the so-called "Zone", an Alien landing site, where he leads people to a room that grants people’s innermost desires, which…

by Bogumil JarmulakMay 4, 2021

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Literature

Dickens and Modernity: Background

This is the opening portion of a lecture on Dickens’s Hard Times, but I want to examine Dickens not only as an artist but in relation to his fictional depiction of what we think of as “modernity.” Modernity is in part a set of ideas and aspirations, a set of…

January 16, 2007
Literature

Dickens and the French Revolution: Background

A Tale of Two Cities was published in 1859, the 70th anniversary of the beginning of the original revolution, usually dated to the fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789. This stood to Dickens’s time approximately as WW II does for us. My parents, and your grandparents, remember WW…

January 15, 2007

Sermon Notes, Third Sunday After Epiphany

INTRODUCTION God is unseen, John says (v. 12). How then can the world know Him? John places the burden of showing God on us: The world knows the God who is love through the love we have for one another. THE TEXT “No one has seen God at any time.…

January 15, 2007

Eucharistic meditation, Second Sunday after Epiphany

1 John 4:9: By this the love of God is manifested in us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to…

January 14, 2007

Exhortation, Second Sunday After Epiphany

Love is blind, we like to say. John says the opposite. John teaches that we need to test and discern and judge the spirits and prophets. Discernment means keeping your eyes open. Discernment means not believing everything that you hear, not jumping on every bandwagon that passes through town, not…

January 14, 2007
History

Ex cathedra

When Frederick the Elector of Saxony protected Luther from church and imperial authorities, it was not as a personal friend but to protect the rights of the university faculty to exercise censorship in religious matters. The Reformation thus planted the seeds for the exaltation of the university Professor in German…

January 13, 2007

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