Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
There’s something about joy that is infectious. And occasionally, we all have the opportunity to be in someone’s presence who is so happily engaged in their work, so joyous in their pursuits, that we want to learn from them. We want to know where that joy comes from and attain…
Jesus has told us that He intends all nations to be discipled. Nations. Not just individuals. All nations as theocracies. That being the case, the Church exists for the life of the world. Being baptized is not only a matter of becoming part of a new family, it is also…
Harold Bloom’s essay on Macbeth includes the kind of penetrating insights that make Bloom the great Shakespearean scholar that he is, but it also includes his typical and intense anti-Christian bias. “If Lear was pre-Christian, then Macbeth is weirdly post-Christian. There are, as we have seen, Christian intimations that haunt…
Revelation 16 is a day of atonement text. The tabernacle of the testimony has been opened (15:5). The angels who receive the bowls are clothed in linen (15:6), the clothing of the high priest when he goes into the sanctuary on the day of atonement (Leviticus 16:4). The temple is…
From time to time, when I’ve lectured on how to read the Bible, I’ve used art-music as one example thereof. When we listen to a simple folk song, we hear the same melody over and over again, but this is not how composers write "high" music. Let me amplify. A…
"For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea-monster, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth" (Matthew 12:40). Some reflections on Jonah’s Big Fish have led to the following essay. Let me…
Showing page 142 of 309
Showing page 22 of 43
Phillip Johnson reports on the scandal concerning the peppered moth in the December 2003 issue of Touchstone . It’s a pretty grim story, recently told by Judith Hooper in Of Moths and Men . What Johnson calls the “juiciest” scandal “is that the moths, which are nocturnal, do not rest…
I believe that some time ago I made the connection between Derrida’s “supplement at the origin,” tragedy, and conceptions of the relation of nature and culture. In some systems of thought, culture is a “supplement” to nature and participates in all the problems that Derrida brings out with supplementarity. That…
Exum quotes Arthur Miller on tragedy, and Miller I think gets things quite right: “It matters not at all whether a hero falls from a great height or a small one, whether he is highly conscious or only dimly aware of what is happening, whether his pride brings the fall…
Cheryl Exum’s Tragedy and Biblical Narrative (Cambridge, 1992) argues that there is a “tragic” dimension to the Bible, but in offering her initial explorations she actually seems to be supporting something like the opposite conclusion. 1) She stresses the importance of struggle against fate/gods/God as a key element of tragedy:…
As I’ve considered Hafeman’s take on future and present justification (summarized in an earlier post), I’ve come to have some important reservations. First, as I noted at the time, Hafeman’s construction leaves me uncertain about the role of union with Christ. This problem is fixable, I think: Our union with…
The November 15 Science News has a brief review of a multi-author book entitled Einstein Never Used Flash Cards: How Our Children Really Learn and Why They Need to Play More and Memorize Less . The review states that the authors “encourage parents to allow children to learn problem solving…
Showing page 2158 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
