Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The corona virus hit Western society like a Biblical plague — almost. Biblical plagues were actually much more devastating. Still, as Peter Leithart describes the present situation, it is a judgment from God, because the disease itself together with our political solutions brought about a social situation that fits Deuteronomy’s…
“The achievements of theologians don’t do anything, don’t affect anything, don’t mean anything. What makes anyone think that ‘theology’ is a subject at all?” - Richard Dawkins One cannot be a Christian college president or seminary trustee (your essayist is both) without wondering if Richard Dawkins’s notorious take-down of theology…
Nearly every church that I am aware of has adopted differing practices since the recent virus scare began. Some churches continued to meet during the state lock downs, and other churches left their building empty, meeting online through various video conference technologies. Some churches have gone back to life as…
Fear is an inseparable companion of human life. We are afraid of illness and death, poverty and cataclysms, rejection and betrayal, failure and shame. We are afraid of the unknown, so in a sense we are afraid of the future and life itself. Unless we live in the illusory belief…
In the title above, I put the word “heresies” in quotation marks because I would prefer that the word “heresy” be confined to erroneous beliefs about the Trinity and the Person of Christ, rather than be used broadly to describe any view that might be considered an error. 1 At…
I’ve been trying to work out why I’m feeling existentially disconnected from CoV-19-related fears. I’m taking it seriously, but it’s not registering in any deeply personal way. Partly it’s that my routines are largely undisrupted. But as I reflect on people’s reactions I think there’s more, because a lot of…
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Revelation is divided into four large sections, marked by the phrase “in the Spirit.” (I picked this up from an ETS presentation by E. Michael Rusten.) Jesus is in the Spirit on the island of Patmos (1:9-10); a trumpet voice calls him to heaven and he ascends in the Spirit…
In the final chapter of his magisterial The Mind of Egypt , Jan Assmann sketches out the path by which Egypt left its mark on the modern world. Interest in Egypt surged in the Renaissance, as “newly discovered manuscripts were hailed as the rediscovery of Egyptian wisdom” (427), but it…
Jan Assmann ( The Mind of Egypt ) summarizes the account of the exodus provided by late antique Egyptian writers - Manetho, Apion, and Pompeius Trogus, a first-century BC historian. The last of these conflates the exodus with an old Egyptian story of the expulsion of the lepers: “Moses is…
Assessing the impact of Hellenism on Egyptian culture, Jan Assmann ( The Mind of Egypt ) argues that “The Hellenistic project was not a bid to hellenize the east but to find forms of expression in which indigenous traditions could be made transparent and translatable. Hellenism provided local traditions with…
Robert Kaplan argues in Asia’s Cauldron that control of the South China Sea is going to be critical in the geopolitics of this century. According to Ian Morris’s NYTBR review, “Kaplan starts out from some basic economics. More than half of the world’s annual merchant fleet tonnage (including four-fifths of…
David Owen’s fascinating New Yorker piece on airline seating included these tidbits. “seat-back video screens and the hard frames that surround them pose a safety challenge, partly because of the potential for injuries caused by head strikes, and partly because the computers and the electrical systems that serve them have…
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