Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
“What’s the fastest route” he asks me as we quickly come to a stop behind a sea of red brake lights. I pull out my phone and map all the options. Every way is red with traffic backed up. Deep down I must be a small town girl because traffic…
Dear Friend of Theopolis, I have signed a stack of documents in the years since we started Theopolis, but my heart jumped a few beats as I looked at the thick lease contract. “This is real,” I thought. “This makes it really real.” Theopolis has been real for nearly three…
In the Edenic world of Perelandra, from C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, Ransom notices something about how the Green Lady treats the animals: [1] “There was in her face an authority, in her caresses a condescension, [2] which by taking seriously the inferiority of her adorers made them somehow less inferior…
In my previous two articles, I argued for the significance of the fact that baptism addresses our bodies in their objectivity. In the body, the self has an existence that runs deeper than our consciousness, decision, self-expression, and action. In washing our passive bodies, baptism seals us with an anticipatory…
Judah is a sinful nation, weighed down with iniquity. They are not the seed of Abraham, but the seed of iniquity. Their worship is abominable to Yahweh, because their hands are covered with innocent blood. They have not done good, or sought justice, or reproved the ruthless, or defended the…
Although we tend to define ourselves by our subjectivity —our perceptions, thoughts, feelings, decisions, actions—we are frequently forgetful of the objectivity of the self as body, the reality of the self that underlies and precedes all of our subjectivity. The body is the site of our ‘givenness’, where we are…
Showing page 139 of 309
Showing page 24 of 43
John (Mark 1:4; Luke 3:3) and Jesus (Matthew 4:17; Mark 1:15) come preaching repentance. Over time, though, it becomes clear that the Jews are not repenting, and Jesus begins to denounce the cities that don't respond to His message of repentance (Matthew 11:20-21; 12:41; Luke 10:13; 11:32). Jesus' lurid predictions…
It was not uncommon in the early 19th century for blacks and whites to worship together. As Niebuhr observes, they “did not enjoy complete fellowship” and there was certainly not equality between them, yet “they participated in the same services and were members of the same denominations. . . .…
“Denominational pluralism, on the American plan,” wrote Will Herberg, “means thoroughgoing secularization” (36). By “secularization,” Herberg meant a gap between “conventional” and “operational” religion. Conventional religion is that practiced by religious adherents - Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists. Operational religion is the set of beliefs, rituals, and values that shapes…
After the third angel turns the rivers and springs to blood by pouring the passion of God into them, the “angel of the waters” praises the righteous judgment of God (Revelation 16:5-7). His speech of praise is chiastically arranged, with a modification: A. I heard the angel of waters saying…
Timothy L. Smith offers a vivid portrait of the “loneliness and danger,” as well as the fragmentation of traditional social networks, that the earliest American settlers had to face (contribution to Denominationalism , 50-1): “Gone was the material heritage of the European village - the cottages and garden plots, the…
H. Richard Niebuhr is altogether too much the sociologist. He displays the habit of peering past theological debates to the “roots” of conflict and division in the church, roots that always turn out to be fundamentally social roots. As Milbank stressed, this sort of sociology turns “society” into an explanatory…
Showing page 411 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
