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Writing

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

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Motherhood

Home is the Place They Leave

Your first born is a novelty. Everything seems special and unique. No one’s child is like yours. Then, over time, you begin to make mistakes. Some strategies don’t work on the additional personalities born into your family, or they simply don’t scale from a practical perspective. With maturity, you realize…

by Mandi GerthMay 17, 2022
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John

Unionized Perfection

Could Jesus have sinned? Before answering the question, it's best to run through a couple of qualifiers. First, scripture clearly teaches He did not sin. Second, I realize the seeming futility when discussing hypothetical situations. The question of the peccability of Jesus, or Jesus's capacity to sin, is in reality,…

by Matthew CoreyMay 12, 2022
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Grace

The Farm

The first time I saw the inside of a prison was in 1999; I was 16. I hadn’t knocked over a fruit stand or been caught stealing hubcaps, I was just an unsuspecting teenager playing piano for a Louisiana gospel group. One Wednesday evening in October, my pastor and leader…

by Brandon MeeksMay 10, 2022
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Biblical Studies

Its Lamp is the Lamb: The Diminishing Rule of the Celestial Bodies

The act of naming carries a lot of weight in the Bible. Naming denotes authority and possession; the namer signifying that he understands the thing named, and therefore possesses the requisite wisdom to rule over it. God set the stage for naming when he named the domains during the first…

by Daniel StanleyMay 3, 2022
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Pastoral Ministry

The Algebra of Church Growth

This short essay makes an obvious point: Church growth is a matter of the rate of entry into a church relative to the rate of exit from that church. Perhaps church growth literature has long recognized that fact. Yet given the greater focus in church – at least in my…

by James R. RogersApril 26, 2022
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Boniface Option

An Arrow Has a Telos: Strategy in the Negative World

If you’ve not yet heard of Aaron Renn’s three worlds framework , here’s the quick version: once upon a time, being a Christian was a net social good in American society. Whatever was going on behind the scenes in elite institutions, the general rank-and-file perception of Christianity was positive. That…

by Tim NicholsApril 19, 2022

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God With Us

In his The Person of Christ (Contours of Christian Theology) (180) , Donald MacLeod gives this vivid sketch of what it meant for the Word to dwell among us: “For the Son of God, the incarnation meant a whole new set of relationships: with his father and mother; with his…

January 12, 2013

Trinity House: Robert Wilken says…

The launching of Trinity House is very good news for theological education. Its program is at once fresh and innovative and at the same time rooted deeply in the Church’s most ancient traditions. This is no conventional academic institute. Its directors are as much interested in the practice of prayer…

January 12, 2013

Getting Jenson Wrong

In a brief discussion, Michael Horton ( Lord and Servant: A Covenant Christology , 97) claims that for Robert Jenson “God [is] ‘a fugue, a conversation, a personal event’” and gives this rejoinder: “It is one thing to say that the triune God is three persons . . . engaged…

January 12, 2013

What Porn Watchers Watch

DePaul’s Carolyn Bronstein reviews the forthcoming biopic of Deep Throat star Linda Lovelace at the Atlantic . It’s not easy reading: “Linda died at 53 after a Denver automobile accident, but her account of sexual slavery on the set of Deep Throat is preserved in her 1980 autobiography, Ordeal .…

January 11, 2013

Torture on Film

In the NYRB , Steve Coll complains about the depiction of torture in Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar-nominated Zero Dark Thirty . The film poses as a form of journalism, flashing a “based on real events” in the early frames. Coll doesn’t think it measures up. For one thing, the film all…

January 11, 2013

House of Treasures

The ark of the covenant is a type of Christ, Bede says ( Bede: On the Tabernacle (Liverpool University Press - Translated Texts for Historians) , 20). It is also a type of the church: “the ark can also be taken figuratively as the Holy Church which is constructed from…

January 11, 2013

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