Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I live in an area where Mardi Gras is in full swing, and I can remember from my upbringing that Fat Tuesday was a last ditch effort at debauchery before the pseudo-spiritual practice of “giving something up for Lent” really began. In my youth I would give up some kind…
Part 1: Observations from the Texts (Matthew 9:14-17, Mark 2:18-22, Luke 5:33-39) The precipitating context for the new wine/old wineskins discussion is people asking Jesus why His disciples did not fast. His immediate answer is that you can’t get the friends of the groom to fast at the bachelor party…
Simply, “progress” means to move forward. In that sense, a slug can progress from one end of the sidewalk to the other. But for us in twenty-first century America, progress means something else. For us, it is almost a synonym for goodness. The slug can only “progress” if the other…
I have the privilege of being able to counsel a lot of women who are seeking abortions. I can tell you that the majority of them are seeking to end their pregnancies not because they feel like it would be a fun thing to do, but because they are scared…
Last night, along with a few online friends, I watched this debate on the meaning of life between William Lane Craig, Rebecca Goldstein, and Jordan Peterson, hosted by Wycliffe College. While watching it, and reflecting upon Peterson’s work more generally (about which I’ve written in the past ), I was…
I’m glad to have been invited to contribute regularly to the Theopolis Institute website. Thank you, readers, for welcoming and joining what I hope will be a venture of integration. Integration itself is what I want to explore. And for me personally, this is the shape of my current integrative…
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Early in his Tragic Sense of Life , Unamuno captures the profound connection between autonomy and tragic character in a passage of hyperventilating passion: “The visible universe, the universe that is created by the instinct of self-preservation, becomes all to narrow for me. It is like a cramped cell, against…
There’s something chiastic going on in 3:19-31 (or maybe 2:25-3:30). A. by works of law no flesh shall be justified, 19-20 B. Apart from law, righteousness of God is revealed, 21 C. righteousness through faith in Jesus—> for all have sinned, 22-23 D. being justified as a gift through Jesus…
A touch of Spenserian humor: Spenser has a witch create a false Florimell (Book 3) for her slothful and unattractive son, who is smitten with the beauty of the real Florimell. The witch uses materials from Petrarchan love sonnets to construct the lady ?Eactual lamps for eyes, actual golden wire…
Spenser might provide a Milbankian response to Milbank’s endorsement of homosexual sex and “threesomes.” In Book 3 of The Faerie Queene , Spenser’s heroine is Britomart, the lady knight who represents a militant chastity directed toward marital and sexual consummation rather than a fearful virginity that simply avoids sex. Britomart…
William Allan Oram in a book on Spenser writes that “one of the fruitful false etymologies of the Renaissance was the derivation of HERO from EROS: by this understanding, love does not hinder noble deeds but spurs them on.”
Also in the November 7 TLS (belatedly on my desk) is a review of Lukas Erne’s Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist , in which Erne challenges the popularly accepted notion that Shakespeare was writing for viewers rather than readers. He shows that plays were being written for publication in Shakespeare’s time,…
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