Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Inspired by our recent podcast on Christmas and Advent music recommendations, we offer here a list of excellent recordings that are sure to enrich your Advent and Christmas season. Praetorius: Mass for Christmas Morning Paul McCreesh with the Gabrieli Consort and Players Amazon | Spotify | Apple Music 2. Christmas…
In the year 1483 in the city of Nuremberg, the leaders of the renowned Saint Lawrence Church were seeking to redesign their altar, and above the table where the priests presided over the eucharist, they wanted new art installed above the prestigious Krell altar. What they decided on took everyone…
The consequences of disobedience start with exile from the garden of God and the Tree of Yahweh, but they do not end there. They cascade down through the structure of the dynastic order. Everything which had previously been given in the Kingdom of Elohim is either taken back or curtailed…
Parallelism: A Course Correction If you have ever studied Hebrew poetry, you have probably heard its basic poetic feature described as “parallelism.” Hebrew poetry is not metered, it does not rhyme, it does not employ many of the common poetical tropes, but its distinctive (and almost universal) feature is commonly…
In The Crown and the Courts , David C. Flatto traces the development of the idea of judicial independence in Jewish commentaries on the Scriptures – particularly Deuteronomy 17 – from the Second Temple and early rabbinic periods. These periods roughly span 400 BC to 300 AD. Flatto does not…
A curious feature of the Infancy Narratives in the Gospel of Luke is the naming of John the Baptist. When the angel appears to Zechariah, he is instructed to give his promised son the name John (Luke 1:13). On the day of John’s circumcision, Luke tells us that “they [presumably…
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Uche Anizor writes to thank me for my review of his recent Kings and Priests , and to correct some misstatements. First, I complained in my review that he didn’t give attention to the role of the pastor as lead priest-king-reader in a community of readers. In fact., he does.…
In February 2013, I predicted that the GOP would buckle on gay marriage. It was an easy, unoriginal prediction, and the evidence continues to pile up. Chris Geidner reports at BuzzFeed : “Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker — one of the Republicans often discussed as a potential 2016 presidential nominee —…
Sam Wells ends his appreciative Christian Century review of Rowan Williams’s Faith in the Public Square with this incisive comment: “The task is not simply to expose the inadequacy of a world without God or to show the collaborative spirit of religious engagement in the common good. It surely must…
Christopher Beeley’s Leading God’s People is a pastoral guide drawn whose wisdom is drawn from the great pastoral theologians of the early church. In an opening chapter on leadership in the church, Beeley observes that early pastors complained about being pulled here and there from their primary tasks - “preaching,…
In a comment on the description of Cyrus as a “shepherd” in Isaiah 44:24-45-7, John Goldingay ( The Theology of the Book of Isaiah , 66-7) observes that “in Old Testament times, ‘shepherd’ was a recognizable way to describe the role of a king. A shepherd is in charge of…
In her study of Eucharist and the Poetic Imagination in Early Modern England , Sophie Read observes that since Donne never wrote directly on the sacramental debates of the Reformation era, his view has to be “reconstructed . . . from its rhetorical trace” (86). Puns provide one source. A…
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