Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Why there is more to Jephthah than meets than eye It was not that long ago that I realized the Jephthah-story and the Jesus-story were basically the same story. Sounds crazy, I know. But here is a one-paragraph synopsis of both: The people of God have gone their own way,…
G.K. Chesterton famously said that the Gospels don’t reveal Jesus’ mirth. It’s true we never catch Jesus laughing. But can we believe He never did? I don’t think so. Laughter is human, and Jesus was fully human. Jesus promised that those who mourned would laugh. He mourned; would He not…
Matthew 2 has all the elements of an exodus story. There’s a murderous king, who slaughters Jewish babies. There’s a infant who will be Israel’s future deliverer, saved from the murderous king so He can later return to save His people and lead them to the Promised land. There’s an…
The calendar of Israel was primarily theological, centered on commemorating the salvific acts of God, but also agricultural, celebrating the creation-restoring effects of those salvific acts. The feasts of the first month celebrated the reviving of the world in the Spring, and typified the cutting off of the Savior in…
The chiastic shape corresponds to the shape of human life. This should not surprise us, because we are made in the image of God, and God is manifest in Word and Spirit. If we are living epistles, our lives will look a bit like the literary shape of the books…
Back in January, Venkatesh Rao wrote a fascinating post on the Ribbonfarm blog, discussing different forms of models of narrative. Engaging with Ursula LeGuin’s talk ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ , Rao explores her contrast between the (male) ‘hero narrative’ and the (female) ‘carrier-bag story’, and suggests a third…
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Study of the sacramental in early modern English poetry has become a cottage industry in literary scholarship. Kimberley Johnson isn't satisfied with the direction this scholarship has taken, and in her Made Flesh , she offers a corrective. Much of the scholarship has focused on sacramental, especially Eucharistic, doctrine as…
What is sacrifice for? Many ancient cultures thought that animal offers fed the gods. The situation is more ambiguous for ancient Greeks. As Charles Stocking points out in his Politics of Sacrifice in Early Greek Myth and Poetry , the only explicit evidence for the notion that sacrifice is food…
In a TLS review of several recent books on China , Gavin Jacobson highlights the role of geography and history in the formation of contemporary Chinese politics. Geography first: "China is enclosed within 14,000 miles of land borders and a 9,000-mile sea edge. Twenty countries lie next to it, including…
In an essay in the Economic Journal (117 [2007] 146-73), Robert Sugden and Luigino Bruni describe how "psychology was removed from economics, and how it might be brought back." The development of behavior economics provides a starting point for them to examine the "Pareto turn," the work of Vilfredo Pareto…
In a long and stimulating piece in the New Atlantis , Samuel Matlack explores the role of metaphor in contemporary physics, especially with regard to the challenges of translating the mathematical formulae of theory into popular writing. Have we, he asks, transcended the need for poetry in our explanations of…
In a discussion of a First Things article about Christian colleges by Carl Trueman, Rod Dreher writes : Sometimes I hear Christians saying things along the lines of, 'Bring it on! The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church!' etc. These are the kind of romantics who…
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