Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto Me. In 2005, God blessed our family with our third child, our second daughter, whom we named Bethany. As soon as Bethany was born, we knew there was something different about her. Unlike her two older siblings, who were born…
Christian, what is it that we believe? While Creeds like the Nicene and Apostle’s have been fundamental pieces of Christian liturgy and life, the American Church is highly unattached to these classic statements. From this creedal phobia has arisen the popular “No Creed, but Christ” slogan. Such slogan, of course,…
Revisiting William Cavanaugh’s devastating 2009 The Myth of Religious Violence . The myth of Cavanaugh’s title is a well-known one. According to the myth, religion is a distinct sphere of human life and practice from the rest of human social life, a universal impulse in human beings, and is dogmatic,…
19 Then the same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews, came Jesus and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you. 20 And when he had so…
An octave is a repetition, a repetition with a difference. It’s not the first note played again , but the first note played at a higher pitch. Octaves have always marked new beginnings. Hebrew boys were circumcised on the eighth day. Firstborn sheep were dedicated to Yahweh on the eighth…
We say Jesus’ resurrection is good news. It wasn’t good news for the disciples on the first Easter. More like perplexing, bewildering news. For others, it wasn’t perplexing, and it certainly wasn’t good. It was plain old bad news. Early in Luke’s gospel, Herod is terrified that Jesus might be…
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My Solemn Charge and Exhortation to inaugurate our 2019 Pentecost Term course . The anthropologist Mary Douglas once observed that modernity has witnessed “a wide-spread, explicit rejection of ritual as such. Ritual is become a bad word signifying empty conformity.” To which many would reply, So what? Haven’t Christians been…
I offered the following remarks at the beginning of the Theopolis Feast, which we celebrated last Saturday evening . Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Welcome to the Theopolis Feast, the first of what we hope will become an annual event. I’m…
A friend asked me to write an exhortation for a newly ordained deacon. Here’s what I wrote . In many churches, deacons seem to be menial laborers. They prepare budgets, maintain church buildings, organize work days, clean up after pot luck dinners. Pastors and elders do spiritual things; deacons worry…
In a column this week on David Brooks's new book, Rod Dreher admitted, “my politics are driven entirely by fear of the Left, specifically on matters of religious liberty and social policy.” As always, Rod writes with a searing honesty, but his self-assessment also exposes the weakness of his political…
Once, argues Nicholas Xenos ( Scarcity and Modernity ), “scarcity” did not exist. What existed with “scarcities,” or “periods of scarcity.” He writes, “Of medieval origin, ‘scarcity’ derives from the Old Northern French escarcete . Its original usage denoted an insufficiency of supply, and by the fifteenth century the word…
Leviticus 2 prescribes the rite for the tribute offering ( minchah ). Three general forms are described, differing mainly by the ways they are prepared before they are brought to the sanctuary. There are flour offerings (vv. 1-3), baked minchah (vv. 4-10), and grains roasted in fire (vv. 14-16). Baked…
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