Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
“What’s the fastest route” he asks me as we quickly come to a stop behind a sea of red brake lights. I pull out my phone and map all the options. Every way is red with traffic backed up. Deep down I must be a small town girl because traffic…
Dear Friend of Theopolis, I have signed a stack of documents in the years since we started Theopolis, but my heart jumped a few beats as I looked at the thick lease contract. “This is real,” I thought. “This makes it really real.” Theopolis has been real for nearly three…
In the Edenic world of Perelandra, from C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, Ransom notices something about how the Green Lady treats the animals: [1] “There was in her face an authority, in her caresses a condescension, [2] which by taking seriously the inferiority of her adorers made them somehow less inferior…
In my previous two articles, I argued for the significance of the fact that baptism addresses our bodies in their objectivity. In the body, the self has an existence that runs deeper than our consciousness, decision, self-expression, and action. In washing our passive bodies, baptism seals us with an anticipatory…
Judah is a sinful nation, weighed down with iniquity. They are not the seed of Abraham, but the seed of iniquity. Their worship is abominable to Yahweh, because their hands are covered with innocent blood. They have not done good, or sought justice, or reproved the ruthless, or defended the…
Although we tend to define ourselves by our subjectivity —our perceptions, thoughts, feelings, decisions, actions—we are frequently forgetful of the objectivity of the self as body, the reality of the self that underlies and precedes all of our subjectivity. The body is the site of our ‘givenness’, where we are…
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From the radio reports I hear, it seems that Arnold’s campaign is an extension of his movie career. At one stop, he unveils a bus bearing his mug, and buses for the press labeled “Predators.” At another stop, he talks about taxes, and says that in the movies he destroys…
In his Miscellanies , Edwards has some fascinatingly positive things to say about Samson. For example: In Judg xvi. 1, 2, we have an account how Samson loved a harlot, and from his love to her exposed himself to be compassed round by his enemies. So the prophecies represent the…
A few quotations from Edwards’ “Images of Divine Things” (1728): “When we travail up an hill ‘tis against our natural tendency and inclination, which perpetually is to descent; and therefore we can’t go on ascending without labor and difficulty. But there arises a pleasant prospect to pay us for our…
Mark Noll’s account of Edwards’s role in the undermining of the Puritan “sacred canopy” in New England, in his recent book America’s God , is an important analysis of one phase in the rise of American religion. According to Noll, the pattern goes something like this: 1) The Puritans had…
Thinking through an upcoming lecture on Edwards, I had a Borgesian moment: In 1731, there was a fire at the Cottonian library in England that nearly destroyed the single manuscript containing the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf . In the same year, Edwards preached a controversial sermon at his church in Northampton,…
Every great civilization has some equivalent of what the fifth-century (BC) Athenians called polupragmosune . As defined by William Arrowsmith, that word “connotes energy, enterprise, daring, ingenuity, originality, and curiosity; negatively it means restless instability, discontent with one’s lot, persistent and pointless busyness, meddling interference, and mischievous love of novelty.”…
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