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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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Divine humanity

Hamann opens his Will and Testament of the Knight of the Rose-Cross with “If God is supposed to be the origin all effects in great things and small, or in heaven and in earth, then every numbered hair on our head is as divine as the behemoth, that chief of…

September 20, 2008
Biblical Studies

Intoxicating reading

Augustine on John 2: “Read all the prophetic books without perceiving Christ: what will you find so insipid and so silly? Understand Christ there, and what you are reading not only becomes savory but intoxicates.” Hamann quotes this in his Aesthetica in nuce : Intelliges ibi CHRISTUM, non solum sapit,…

September 20, 2008
History

Politics of style

MacMullen again, on the style of late Roman communications (written in purple ink): “It was extremely conscious, the late descendant of centuries of rhetorical art, marked by many poetical tricks: avoidance of hiatus or of inelegant words; metrical terminations of sentences and clauses; variation through an apparently limitless vocabulary of…

September 18, 2008
History

Most Holy Place

Ramsay MacMullen describes the proper approach to a late Roman emperor: “Few saw him, for few were admitted to his presence. Properly searched first for weapons, one passed through rows of guards and rows of ponderous pillars to some more specially solemn portal, opening to a hall fifty, a hundred,…

September 18, 2008
History

Reverse Revisionism

Leon Aron reviews Putin’s views on Russian history in a lengthy article in TNR (September 24). At a conference, for instance, Putin admitted that there have been “problematic pages in our history,” but goes on: “what state hasn’t? And we’ve had fewer of such pages than some other [states]. And…

September 17, 2008
Literature

Sanctimony and Resistance

Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll is based on the arguments between Vaclav Havel and Milan Kundera concerning the way Czech intellectuals should pursue resistance to Soviet domination. One exchange in the play draws on a letter that Havel circulated asking Gustav Huzak to release Milan Hubl and others who were…

September 17, 2008

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