Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In Colossians 4:7-9, Paul tells the Colossian church that he is sending Tychicus and Onesimus to them. It is clear that they are to deliver the letter Paul has written to the church and that they are also to report to the church the details of Paul’s ministry in chains…
On the 11 th of April, 1985, the communist dictator Enver Hoxha breathed his last. It was the beginning of the end of communist Albania. After 40 years of being isolated from almost the entire world, the Albanian people started to see what life really looked like outside their borders.…
Karl Ove Knausgaard once reminisced about an author he referred to as “the man with his sweater tucked into his trousers” who, upon entering the room, would declare as if it was his creed, “I write because I am dying.” Knausgaard acknowledges this to be one reason among many why…
The Missing “It Was Good” The patterns and repetitions of Genesis 1 are well known: God speaks, it happens, and God sees that it’s good; names are given, and there’s evening and there’s morning: a day. But the patterns of creation, like the patterns throughout Scripture, are marked by variation…
And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the…
The Bible is a book about trees. We start in Eden with two trees, we end in the New Jerusalem with a single double-trunked tree, and the story hinges around the tree they nailed our Lord to. Seeing the Forest We find trees singled out on day three of creation.…
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The exhortation for Sunday, September 14: Jesus knew that His teaching differed from the teaching of others in Israel and especially from the Pharisees, and His warnings at the end of the sermon show that He wanted to distinguish His teaching from others. He gives a quick succession of “cartoons”…
The life of Aldous Huxley is a parable of the modern age. Descended from Darwin’s bulldog Thomas Henry Huxley and Matthew Arnold, Huxley was part of an elite intellectual class of distinctly Victorian orientation. He was greatly offended by the “mass culture” that he saw developing around him, and wrote…
In Jesus’ “sermon on the plain” in Luke 6 there are a number of cool structures and numerological patterns. The whole sermon is divided into three large chunks, the Beatitudes (vv. 20-27), a section on love of enemies (vv. 27-38, which is marked out by the beginning phrase “But I…
Noemie Emery is one of the most interesting political writers today. She has a David Brooksish ability to display the inner connections between politics, personality, and culture, all with a sharp historical sensibility. She is not nearly so entertaining a writer as Brooks, but more profound. Consider this superb passage…
Neil Elliot, in the book mentioned in the previous post, says that “The conspirators who assassinated Caligula included an officer he had sexually humiliated, who stabbed the emperor repeatedly in the genitals.” I recall that Plutarch records something similar about Brutus’s strike against Julius Caesar. Does this suggest that striking…
In the midst of some typical and typically inane apology for sodomy, Neil Elliot (in Liberating Paul: The Justice of God and the Politics of the Apostle , Orbis, 1994) raises the interesting question of why Paul focuses on sexual immorality at the beginning of his letter to the Romans…
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