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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In a December 2012 article in Charisma Magazine , Audrey Lee reports on the Christian revival taking place among Muslims in Iraq and Iran: “Mission researchers estimate more Muslims have committed to follow Christ in the last 10 years than in the last 15 centuries of Islam. Yet Islamic governments…
Though Kurt Stasiak is a Roman Catholic and a Benedictine, much of what he writes in Sacramental Theology: Means of Grace, Way of Life (Catholic Basics: A Pastoral Ministry Series) is catholic in another sense. He points out (18) that sacraments are not a “sacred parenthesis,” a slice of holy,…
In their history of zoos ( Zoo: A History of Zoological Gardens in the West ), Eric Baratay and Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier note a connection between Crusades and the development of European zoos. Romans maintained seraglios for the animals used in combats, and these were continued in Byzantium until the twelfth…
Some nuggets from Thomas. The first from his commentary on the Sentences (XLIV, 1, 2): “They reason falsely [who say that] since an angel is better than a stone, therefore two angels are better than one angel and a stone . . . . Although an angel, considered absolutely is…
It’s odd to describe a book with a title like Life, the Universe, and Everything: An Aristotelian Philosophy for a Scientific Age as “delightful” and “charming,” but that’s what Ric Machuga’s book is. Besides “clear,” “rigorous” and “illuminating.” Some samples from a discussion of God’s omnipotence (pp. 256-7): “Suppose an…
In his Christianity and History (94), Herbert Butterfield gives this wonderful musical analogy of history: “We might say that this human story is like a piece of orchestra music that we are playing over for the first time. In our presumption we may act as though we were the composer…
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