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Writing

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

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Creation

Why Genesis Matters

Creationism is debated widely in the US, especially when it comes to teaching creation as an alternative theory of origins in public schools. Every few months, there’s another poll showing that many Americans still believe Ussher’s claim that the world was created around 4000 BC, which always elicits a contemptuous…

by Peter LeithartAugust 20, 2014
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Books

Canary in the Coal Shaft

Walker Percy died in 1990, but his six published novels and his collections of essays are more relevant than when he wrote them. Percy was an American Dostoevsky, and that was no accident. “The European novels,” he says in a 1974 interview, “are more philosophical, more novels of ideas.” Dostoevsky,…

by Peter LeithartAugust 18, 2014
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Children

Parenting in the Spirit

The Spirit is God’s agent for renewing the creation, for restoring bonds between nations, for knitting together people into the body of Christ. The Spirit is the renewer of the world, and the bond of all relations. That means that if you want your family to be knit together, if…

by Peter LeithartAugust 13, 2014
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Revelation

Hunter Into Prey

In their basic physical sense , the verbs translated as "persecute" in the Bible mean “chase” or “pursue,” and that fits the context quite naturally. As Pharaoh “pursued” (LXX, dioko ; Heb. radaph ) Israel into the wilderness, for example, so the dragon chases the woman back to her place…

by Peter LeithartAugust 11, 2014
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Books

Edwards Our Contemporary

Seng-Kong Tan’s Fullness Received and Returned is a densely argued, thoroughly researched, contextually sensitive study of participation in the soteriology of Jonathan Edwards. Along the way, Tan deals with many of the central themes in Edwards’s theology. As with many recent studies of Edwards, Tan’s monograph demonstrates both Edwards’s creativity…

by Peter LeithartAugust 6, 2014
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Art

Portrait of the Artist as Aesthetic Martyr

The title of James Joyce’s first novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man indicates that it is a bildungsroman , a story of formation that describes the formative experiences of a poet who aspires to artistic greatness. The education described is Joyce’s own. The novel recounts the failing…

by Peter LeithartAugust 4, 2014

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Dialectic of Physics

Jason Josephson-Storm ( Myth of Disenchantment ) offers this potted history of modern physics: "Even as Descartes liberated an autonomous realm for the thinking subject, his mechanism denied action at a distance and rejected the concept of the void. But this form of corpuscular mechanism was disrupted by Newton's emphasis…

May 4, 2018

People Without History

"The habit of treating named entities such as Iroquois, Greece, Persia, or the United States as fixed entities opposed to one another by stable internal architecture and external boundaries interferes with our ability to understand their mutual encounter and confrontation," writes Eric Wolf in Europe and the People Without History…

May 4, 2018
Masculinity

Pretense of Masculinity

"Human life is radical, constituent insecurity," writes Julian Marias ( Metaphysical Anthropology ). "It consists in having to do something, in a frequently hostile, always problematical, and largely latent circumstance, and in not knowing what to hold to. This is man's condition: his insecurity, his neediness, his ignorance, his indecision,…

May 4, 2018

What Is Disenchantment?

Jason Josephson-Storm tells us what Weber's disenchantment is not : It doesn't mean that magic is eliminated. Protestants "were against magic and superstitious rituals" but they never doubted the reality of magic or the crowdedness of the universe ( Myth of Disenchantment , 280). Disenchantment also "is not a new…

May 4, 2018

Greek Temple Architecture

Mary Emerson's Greek Sanctuaries and Temple Architecture is a concise, informative introduction to her topic. After introductory chapters explaining the meaning, uses, architecture and artistic adornments of sanctuaries in the Greek world, Emerson devotes a chapter to the major cultic sites of Greece - Delphi, Athens, the sanctuary of Apollo…

May 4, 2018

Abstraction and Image

In his recently published Lewis on the Christian Life , Joe Rigney devotes a few pages to expounding Lewis's understanding of the relation between abstract theological statements and the images of Scripture. He endorses the abstractions as a caution against false inferences that might be drawn from the images, but…

May 3, 2018

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