Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In the Bible, fatness is such a blessing, that it is especially hard to understand why wicked men are permitted to enjoy such a state. It requires a theodicy and faith in God. Thus: “For they have no pangs until death; their bodies are fat and sleek . They are…
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The allusion to the Exodus story is contained in the first words of Deuteronomy 14:1 — “ye are the sons of Yahweh your God” — as well as in 14:2 in the use of the technical term translated “treasured possession,” “His own possession,” “peculiar people,” “precious people,” and so forth.…
I have argued that Deuteronomy 14:1-21 is an independent literary unit that applies the Third Word to the lives of Israelites from the time of Moses and Joshua. In this short pericope, Moses suggests broad and deep meaning by means of literary allusion to the stories of the creation and…
In his recently republished The New Creation , the late, delightful Herbert McCabe defends the priesthood of the plebs as roundly as anyone could want. Citing Hebrews, he claims that "there is an essential difference between the Christian community and the community of the Old Law, or any other religious…
Augustine famously prayed, “Our hearts our restless until they rest in You.” True indeed. Being creatures, we inherently sense our ontological poverty—our innate condition of dependence—and are compelled to find a sense of security. And it is also true—as Augustine’s own narrative painfully illustrates—that one of the things we most…
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Drawing on the work of Oliver O'Donovan, Jamie Smith offers a critique of natural law as an adequate grounding for political theology. Positively, Smith argues that “he public task of the church is not just to remind the world of what it (allegedly) already knows (by ‘natural' reason), but to…
At the beginning of his Silence and Praise , Ryan Hansen summarizes several of the recent approaches to understanding the cosmology of the book of Revelation. The most popular today borrows from the sociology of knowledge to suggest that John's writing creates a “symbolic universe” or “worldview” for his readers.…
The emphasis on chastity, virginity, and lack of defilement from women does not have to do with misogyny or asceticism. In biblical perspective, it means that this is both a liturgical and a military assembly. When Israel arrived at Sinai, the men had to keep themselves from women so as…
In his Gift and the Unity of Being , Antonio Lopez claims that “Christ's kenotic gift of self restores unity with God. The redemption of the gift allows man to see that unity with God is possible and that it generates a whole that is greater than its parts. St.…
Douglas Rushkoff's Nothing Sacred is rather all over the place (as one might say if one had a thickly superior British accent). The Judaism he favors isn't a “traditional community with concrete values and well-defined rules” (1) but one that “stresses transparency, open-ended inquiry, assimilation of the foreign, and a…
Explaining the power of liturgical habit, Paul Griffiths ( Decreation ) offers writing as an example of the self-forgetful, and world-forgetful, character of habit. It's one of the best descriptions of the experience of writing that I have come across. A few preliminaries to make sense of the analysis: Griffiths…
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