Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Your first born is a novelty. Everything seems special and unique. No one’s child is like yours. Then, over time, you begin to make mistakes. Some strategies don’t work on the additional personalities born into your family, or they simply don’t scale from a practical perspective. With maturity, you realize…
Could Jesus have sinned? Before answering the question, it's best to run through a couple of qualifiers. First, scripture clearly teaches He did not sin. Second, I realize the seeming futility when discussing hypothetical situations. The question of the peccability of Jesus, or Jesus's capacity to sin, is in reality,…
The first time I saw the inside of a prison was in 1999; I was 16. I hadn’t knocked over a fruit stand or been caught stealing hubcaps, I was just an unsuspecting teenager playing piano for a Louisiana gospel group. One Wednesday evening in October, my pastor and leader…
The act of naming carries a lot of weight in the Bible. Naming denotes authority and possession; the namer signifying that he understands the thing named, and therefore possesses the requisite wisdom to rule over it. God set the stage for naming when he named the domains during the first…
This short essay makes an obvious point: Church growth is a matter of the rate of entry into a church relative to the rate of exit from that church. Perhaps church growth literature has long recognized that fact. Yet given the greater focus in church – at least in my…
If you’ve not yet heard of Aaron Renn’s three worlds framework , here’s the quick version: once upon a time, being a Christian was a net social good in American society. Whatever was going on behind the scenes in elite institutions, the general rank-and-file perception of Christianity was positive. That…
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T o celebrate the centenary of Jane Jacobs's birth, Adam Gopnik devotes a New Yorker piece to the lyricist of the American city. Gopnik finds that her classic, Death and Life of Great American Cities “is still astonishing to read, a masterpiece not of prose—the writing is workmanlike, lucid—but of…
S everal weeks ago, I devoted my FT column to examining the Obama administration’s effort to consolidate its gender-equality gains by hiring attorneys to investigate and prosecute civil rights violations. Obama appointees will burrow in and continue the Obama agenda after he leaves office. Evan Osnos's attempt to imagine Trump’s…
O nce upon a time, everyone knew how Islam came into existence. As Tom Holland says ( In the Shadow of the Sword ), “Whole centuries’ worth of scholarship have been founded on the presumption that the sources for early Islam can be trusted. To this day, they continue to…
E veryone who has sung a Christmas carol knows that “Immanuel” means “God with us,” but centuries of singing about Immanuel have domesticated and sentimentalized the word. The concept of “Immanuel” has a long history before Isaiah applied it to a child Messiah (Isaiah 7). It arises, in part, from…
T homas Small doesn’t think Hugh Kennedy’s Caliphate gives enough attention to the theological roots of the Caliphate. In his TLS review , he writes wryly: “ Reading Kennedy’s account of the Caliphate, you’d be forgiven for forgetting that there’s anything particularly religious about it. ” According to Small, the…
Early in his To Change the World , James Davison Hunter counters simplistic Christian understanding of cultural change with a series of propositions about the character of culture and the dynamics of cultural change. Proposition Eleven is simultaneously reassuring and sobering: “Cultures change, but rarely if ever without a fight”…
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