Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
"The faithful use of sacraments, and indeed a fully sacramental view of creation, is vital to the life of the Church. Baptism and the Lord's Supper are rites that directly shape the community and the Body, because they were given by God for that express purpose. A deficient practice of…
Weightlessness is fun. At the beginning of Gravity (2013) , we can see one astronaut dancing the Macarena and another one playing with his jetpack. They like it out there in the space. Apart from zero-gravity they can enjoy beautiful views, and even the silence is likable, although Matt Kowalski…
I recently went to a lunch that is more or less quarterly. About a dozen of us go. It is a lunch held in honor of a retired professor of religion and philosophy. I have been one of his acquaintances for more than 40 years. In his tenure as professor,…
Why Theopolis? Don't we already have seminaries and Bible colleges and other institutions for theological education? Why do we need another one? I get this question now and again. I ask myself this question even more often. What follows is a partial answer. Back in the 1990s, seminaries seemed to…
I think the logic of the Lutheran Reformation can be summarized in one sentence, attributed to Luther himself: "God does not need your good works, but your neighbor does." The first half of that statement is justification by faith . God doesn't need our works to satisfy his justice or…
If you are looking to start a fight with Christians, there is hardly a better subject to do so than the arts. Music, movies, paintings, and literature have provided no small battlegrounds for Christians to war. We are emotionally invested in the arts. A song, a book, or a film…
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Robert Kuttner's NYRB review of Gareth Dale's Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left highlights Polanyi's relevance to contemporary global politics and economics. Kuttner observes that the "period between the two world wars, free-market liberals governing Britain, France, and the US tried to restore the pre–World War I laissez-faire system.…
The Chronicler gathers all Israel - indeed, a cross section of ancient humanity - on the opening pages of his chronicle. The genealogy is a great, inter-generational qahal (assembly), and the Chronicler is the Qoheleth, the Gatherer. As soon as his story starts, though, Israel is being dispersed. Israel flees…
In his forthcoming The Left Behind , Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow tries to penetrate past the headlines and stereotypes to discover the truth about, his subtitle has it, decline and rage in rural America. Wuthnow didn't drop into flyover country for a long weekend of hanging with local pundits at…
James R. Rogers offers a useful taxonomy of contemporary conservative critiques of globalization. He defines globalization as "decreasing costs to capital and labor mobility. Mobility across, but also within, national borders." Alternatively, it could be defined as "the process of incorporating new regions of the world into a unified market…
In his Religious Philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov , Jonathan Sutton lays out Solovyov's (Solovyev; Soloviev) conception of "free theocracy." For Solovyov, "the realization of the Kingdom of God on earth is presented as an ordering of all aspects of life (individual and communal life) according to Christian principles. Furthermore, this…
In a contribution to The Chronicler as Author , Ehud Ben Zvi reviews five statements about Israel from foreigners in the book of Chronicles. The foreigners are Huram of Tyre, the Queen of Sheba, Sennacherib, Neco king of Egypt, and Cyrus the Persian. The first and last two are positive…
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