Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Place names become fraught with meaning by association with people and events. The name “Wittenberg” calls to mind Luther and the Reformation for Protestants and Catholics alike. Geneva has a wider range of associations, but the Reformation Wall, with its four main statues of William Farel, John Calvin, Theodore Beza,…
“…a mystery without a solution, a horror story without savagery, a nightmare in which all the watches stop at noonday…” The Bestial Gardens of Men Then they will say to the mountains, “Fall on us!” and to the hills, “Cover us!” (Luke 23:30) The following lines by Edgar Allan Poe,…
2 Samuel 11-12, which record David’s sin with Bathsheba and its aftermath, is structured chiastically: This arrangement highlights several things about the episode. It reinforces what is obvious from even a casual reading, that the transition in the story occurs with Nathan’s confrontation of David’s sin and David’s confession. Up…
Medieval bestiaries are packed with quaintly inaccurate information about animals, birds, and other created things. Foxes and snakes are devilish critters; stags, pelicans and elephants are Christlike in their various ways. Of course, the medievals picked this up from the Bible, where bestiary observations are fairly common. “Go to the…
What do Reformational Catholicism and craft beer have in common? The question seems to beg for a punchline. Better yet, it would be pretty good clickbait for an article on Katharina von Bora’s “spirited” contribution that helped spark the Protestant Reformation. Well, this is no joke and I am certainly…
Suffering Defined Suffering happens. We witness it all around us and experience it in our lives. It often comes from forces beyond our control. Suffering is inscrutable; it strikes unexpectedly, on a bright summer day or a cold winter night. We lament and are bewildered by suffering. But we are…
Showing page 117 of 309
Showing page 25 of 43
A thought on the coverage of the Pope’s funeral: When was the last time you saw so many old men on TV?
At one point in Atonement, Briony sends a slightly fictionalized version of part of her story to a magazine. She writes in the style of Virginia Woolf, focusing on light plays on the surfaces of stone and water. The story is rejected, and in explaining the rejection the editor says…
With Ian McEwan’s recent Saturday getting strong reviews everywhere, I decided I needed to read the only McEwan novel that I possess, the 2001 Atonement . Atonement focuses on the story of the Tallis family. On a sultry day in Surrey in the 1930s, through a series of petty conflicts…
From Luther’s Freedom of a Christian : “as our heavenly Father has in Christ freely come to our aid, we also ought freely to help our neighbor through our body and its works, and each one should become as it were a Christ to the other that we may be…
The allusions to Exodus early in Matthew fit into a larger theological and literary thrust of the first gospel. Commentators have often noted that the gospel is organized around five large discourses, some of which are virtually monologues: The sermon on the Mount (chs. 5-7); Jesus?Emission instructions to His disciples…
A discarded fragment from a paper: Virtually any passage of Eliot, even the briefest, would serve for hours of source-checking. Let me offer a brief interpretation of the closing lines of Part I of The Waste Land. The whole section is entitled ‘The Burial of the Dead.’ The final section,…
Showing page 1992 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
