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Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.

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Biblical Horizons

Writing and Thinking

During one of my AAPC lectures I read a portion of Richard Mitchell’s provocative little book The Underground Grammarian . Here’s the portion I read: The mind is a rudderless wanderer blown here or there by any puff of breeze. If I mention watermelons, you must think of watermelons; if…

by Jeff MeyersJanuary 14, 2008
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Biblical Studies

Psalms 23-29: Analysis

This is the donation thank-you essay for January 2008. Our studies in the Psalms go out month by month in response to donations. I’m putting this one up here as an example, and also because the version I actually mailed out contained several egregious arithmetical errors! So, here is the…

by James B. JordanJanuary 6, 2008
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American Culture

The Case Against Western Civilization, Parts 1-7

Part 1: Introduction The collapse of the Western tradition in the United States, seen in the hostility to Christianity in government and education, and the elimination of “traditional” or “canon” learning from our institutions of middle and higher learning, provides a crisis and an opportunity for serious believers at the…

by James B. JordanDecember 5, 2007
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Theologia

On Forgiving Oneself: Nine Reasons Why It Can Be Appropriate

While “forgiving oneself” is widely accepted in the secular world as a legitimate and needful thing to do, Christians are rightly suspicious. After all, God is the one who forgives. When we sin against other people, we need to seek their forgiveness, not our own. Nevertheless after looking at Vine’s…

by Mark HorneJune 6, 2007
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Biblical Studies

Every Word Matters to the Story

This was originally published as HIStory in the column, “A Pastor’s Perspective” in Ligonier Ministrie’s Tabletalk Magazine . I am not sure of the date but it was probably published in 1999 or 2000. Quick! What’s the basic message of the Bible? Summarize it in as few words as possible…

by Mark HorneJune 6, 2007
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Church Government

The Pastorate and the Presbytery

A Brief Explanation of What a Presbytery Is & Why Pastors in Presbyterian Denominations are Members of Them A belief in the primacy of the local congregation of the Church, I think, reflects the gut feeling of most North American Evangelicals. As a result, the form of Church government universally…

by Mark HorneJune 5, 2007

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Dialectic of Realism

Frederic Jameson’s Antinomies of Realism continues the argument he made a couple of decades ago in Signatures of the Visible . In that earlier book, Jameson argues that realism depended on “prolonging and preserving - rather than ‘resolving’ - [a] constitutive tension and incommensurability.” That tension is inherent in realism’s…

July 10, 2014

Piketty and Politics

Duncan Kelly argues in his lengthy TLS review of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century that the “book is as much a story about the limits of modern democratic politics as it is about the structures of inequality.” That is not simply about the anti-democratic role that wealth plays…

July 10, 2014

Resistant Rest

Walter Brueggemann’s Sabbath As Resistance is, like most of Brueggemann’s other work, bracing and frustrating in equal measure. He rightly sees the Sabbath command in connection with the first commandment: Worshiping the God of the exodus means worshiping a God who delivers from the demanding, restless gods of Egypt and…

July 10, 2014

Latin American and the Bilbao Effect

Justin McGuirk argues in his Radical Cities that Latin American was the site of the “greatest experiments in urban living of the twentieth century. Latin America, let us not forget, experienced mass urbanisation long before China and Africa, which today produce almost panic-inducing statistics of urban population growth. In the…

July 10, 2014

Oriental Africa

“Sensing that Africa had been cast aside by the West in the wake of the Cold War,” writes Howard French in China’s Second Continent , “Beijing saw the continent as a perfect proving ground for some Chinese companies to cut their teeth in international business.” That Africa is rich in…

July 9, 2014

Platonic Purification

Socrates’s discussion of purity in the Sophist treats the concept in a refined fashion. He admits the existence of bodily impurities, but his focus is on the mental impurities that need to be cleansed if someone is to escape the evils of ignorance and error. Benjamin Jowett provides this summary…

July 9, 2014

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