Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
We have moved from death to new life, from Lenten darkness to Easter light. And while Easter Sunday may have come and gone, it's effects are continually with us. This season has brought with it several new relationships, events, and signs of growth for Theopolis. We have been networking with…
In The People's Work , a social history of Christian Worship, Frank Senn summarizes the developments of the medieval period with regard to the Eucharist. He begins by challenging the assumption that medieval society was held together by “the church.” He notes that the church was often divided and conflicted,…
The structure of the Bible resembles something which was grown rather than built, composed rather than assembled. Its employment of “structure-as-sign” at every level from micro- to macrocosmic leads to the conclusion that a hermeneutic worthy of Scripture requires not only training in history, art and music but also the…
For some in first-century Israel, Easter was anything but good news. It was a terrifying surprise. For the rulers and powers that put Jesus to death, the idea that He had been raised by some power beyond their control was chilling. Early in Luke’s gospel, we're told that Herod thought…
Simon Peter went up, and drew the net to land, full of large fish, a hundred and fifty-three; and although there were so many, the net was not torn. (John 21:11) This is one of those texts in the Bible that many people puzzle over. It is not a puzzle…
God is not mocked, Paul says. God is mocked, says Matthew. Who’s right? The two are in perfect harmony, but to see that, we need to run through the passage again. We’ll see that at every point, the mockery is being turned against the mockers. At every point, mockery is…
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Prudentius’s Psychomachia (5 th century AD) is one of the first and one of the most influential of medieval allegories. It is the source of the battle of Virtue and Vice that was one of the key themes of medieval allegory, which carries right into the Elizabethan allegory of Spenser's…
R omantic thinkers like Johann Gottfried Herder, developed an organic conception of nationhood. For Herder, a nation is an extended family, and so a perfect nation, the most natural state, is “one nation, an extended family with one national character." (I rely on this essay by Richard White.) People have…
Nations are “imagined communities,” and one of the ways nations imagine themselves is to imagine themselves as very, very old. The Finnish epic, the Kalevala , serves as an illustration of the nexus between ancient literature and national identity. Anderson writes ( Imagined Communities , 74-5), “In the eighteenth century…
In a contribution to Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works Teodolinda Barolini contrasts the love poetry of Petrarch's Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (also known as the Canzoniere ) with that of Dante. Petrarch continues the courtly paradigm. His interest is in the shifting psychology and drama of the male…
In his E nglish Literature in the Sixteenth Century , CS Lewis makes two deflationary comments about the effects of Renaissance humanism. First, “The ‘barbarous’ books [of medieval Latin] have survived in the only sense that really matters: they are used as their authors meant them to be used. It…
Conrad Rudolph's The Mystic Ark is the product of impressive scholarship. Its focus is on the image of the mystic ark, a complex cosmic portrait showing “the Majesty” (looking like Jesus) enthroned, flanked by angels, holding a large disk, inscribed with a square turned sideways like a diamond. Inside the…
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