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

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Apostle Paul

Jonah’s Pauline Move: Finding Mercy for Gentiles in Texts about Mercy for Israel

Jonah is Paul’s typological opposite. Indeed, in the whole Old Testament, it would be difficult to find a more perfect foil to Paul than Jonah. Whereas Paul crosses the sea to enact God’s saving purposes for the Gentiles, Jonah crosses the sea to avoid bringing Gentiles God’s mercy. For that…

by Josh JensenJanuary 11, 2024
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Family

A House for Me

Years ago, I realized that if my children wanted to feel like their house was a home, I needed to be intentional about making our physical shelter a place of spiritual refuge. I began to see the Holy Spirit as the indwelling person of the Trinity—the one who makes His…

by Mandi GerthJanuary 9, 2024
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Charity

On Parrhesia and Gospel Witness

When the crowds encircle Christ in Solomon’s Porch during the Festival of Dedication, they charge him: “tell us boldly who you are!” 1 They do not draw-up to him to with excited anticipation as they did earlier in the Gospel, 2 instead they flank him like a gang of wolves.…

by Mark BriansJanuary 4, 2024
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Deuteronomy

Misunderstanding Moses

1 In Deuteronomy 7:1-5, Moses wrote: When Yahweh your God brings you into the land which you go to possess, and has cast out many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations…

by Ralph Allan SmithJanuary 3, 2024
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Advent

40 Theses on Christmas

Every Advent witnesses the gruesome reanimation of the voice that whispers “you know , Christmas is just a pagan holiday…” with that sort of conversational ellipsis that does not so much invite further reflection but halts and forecloses it. The claims are several and equally spurious: Jesus wasn’t born on…

by Mark BriansDecember 26, 2023
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Genesis

The Twelve Trials of Abraham

Abraham's life in Genesis is a series of trials. He travels hundreds of miles from his family into a new land, flees from a famine into the hands of a king who takes his wife, and after returning, has to rescue his brother from a war. He's involved with two…

by Donald LinnemeyerDecember 26, 2023

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Philosophy

What’s real

We instinctively think that what’s most real or true is what has always been the case. Timeless truth means truth that was already true at the dawn of time. That’s a big problem. It means that nothing that emerges in time is fully real or true. It’s true, only in…

June 20, 2008
Politics

Why Obama Won’t Win

Obama’s achievement is truly a milestone in American history, and should be celebrated as such. He is an impressive man in many ways. But he will not be elected President. The reason is not race, as Noemie Emery argues in the June 23 issue of the Weekly Standard . (Emery,…

June 20, 2008

Proverbs 22:3-11

PROVERBS 22:3 Like many Proverbs, this one treats wisdom and prudence as a matter of foresight. The imagery is of a pathway along which the prudent and the foolish are walking. The prudent sees trouble/evil ahead, and avoids it, while the naïve simpleton keeps going, stumbles right into trouble, and…

June 20, 2008
Philosophy

Fixed past?

Mead thinks that each emerging moment changes the past. It’s difficult to see how it could be otherwise. This doesn’t mean that the directionality of the past is an illusion or reversible. Things done cannot be undone. But what those things are and mean changes as time moves along. The…

June 19, 2008
Philosophy

Abstract time yet again

Abstract time is (Anthony Giddens says) “pure duration, as disconnected from the materiality of experience.” This comes to be seen as “real, ‘objective’ time” because “it is expressed in a universal and public mode.” This is helpful. 2 PM Pacific Time, June 18, 2008 means millions of specific things to…

June 19, 2008
Philosophy

Abstract time again

“Abstract” time often has reference to durations of time, particularly in relation to economic activity. If I work a 40-hour week for a set wage, I get paid the same no matter what I do or don’t accomplish in that time. In the account books, there’s just the number of…

June 19, 2008

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