Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Thus says the Lord: “A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are no more” (Jer 31:15). The Night of the Hunter belongs on every Christian’s Christmas list. My family has even…
One important part of Jesus's birth narrative is the presence of angels. The angel Gabriel appeared to the Virgin Mary, announcing that she would bear a son. And then, on the night Jesus was born, a whole host of angels appeared to the shepherds. Angels are mysterious creatures to us.…
I was settled nicely into my chair and listening to the conversation in an undergrad religion seminar, my last required course to graduate. Though a few Christians sat scattered around the room, the course itself was dedicated to poking holes in traditional understandings of the Bible: our readings deconstructed notions…
God’s symbols belong to Him and to His people. They are constantly at work in the world, including the world of film, music, painting, architecture, and other artforms. You cannot escape God’s symbols or the meaning He has woven into the created order. Artists use and borrow God’s symbols, whether…
For centuries, Christians identified Israel in the Old Testament as a single, literal ethnic group, often called “the Jews.” Even supersessionists – those who believed the Church superseded Israel – assumed the clear-cut, technical definition of “Israel” in the Bible is the ethnic group. However, a deeper dive into Genesis,…
Misreading Intent In the opening verses of Matthew 11, the reader is confronted immediately by John the baptizer who has been imprisoned since 4:12. John poses a question to Jesus, inquiring from prison as to whether or not he is Israel’s awaited Messiah or if they should anticipate another: “Are…
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Registration is now open for the Easter term intensive course on holistic mission at Trinity House. The course will be held at Trinity Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, March 17-21, 2014. The goal of missions is to build holistic, sustainable, and self-propagating Christian communities, or to use the Biblical idiom, to…
The word ‘anaw , “humble” or “meek” is used 13x in the Psalter. It refers to a social position; it’s not only, or even primarily, an attitude of mind, but a life-condition. The meek are the afflicted, low-born, abused. Within the Psalter the word forms a story-arc of sorts. Early…
Miles Kimball of the University of Michigan argues that supporting gay marriage is support for religious freedom. After all, most of the opposition to gay marriage is religious, and in America we aren’t permitted to impose our religion on other people. Besides, Kimball says, gay marriage is an avenue for…
Reflecting on our culture’s penchant for remakes in the NYTBR , James Parker traces the phenomenon to a “commercial factor here: the enormous built-in timidity of the culture industry, which will always be happier with a remake than a new thing. Once youve assembled a hero, a hero that works,…
Jonathan Ree reviews Bruno Latour’s An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns in the TLS , and along the way sums up some of Latour’s contributions to social science. Latour’s early work in the anthropology of science, emphasizing the “social construction” of scientific facts, earned him…
Tim Parks’s piece asking why published authors are shown so much respect begins with the career of Salman Rushdie. An easy mark. But Parks’s larger point still stands: “No one is treated with more patronizing condescension than the unpublished author or, in general, the would-be artist. At best he is…
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