Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Optimism is “an inclination to put the most favorable construction upon actions and events or to anticipate the best possible outcome.” 1 On the other hand, pessimism is “an inclination to emphasize adverse aspects, conditions, and possibilities or to expect the worst possible outcome.” We can see that optimism and…
If we wish to understand the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, we must begin with seeing them as a part of the creational order. Trees, along with plants and seed-bearing things, come to life by the word of God as part of…
“I chant slips and irreversible disasters, wiltings, failures, scars, the little disappointments and the large, blue streaks down a world that wishes it was only suncolors.” Paul J. Pastor from Kintsugi Song I recently lost something very valuable. Something I’d had for years and used every day. But, it wasn’t…
In his eponymous book, Jonah follows an exodus pattern. He travels through the waves and east of the city into the wilderness. On a first reading, it looks like another use of this common literary shape in the Old Testament: salvation through the waters of death and the wilderness of…
“Everyone serves the good wine first, and when people have drunk freely, then the poor wine. But you have kept the good wine until now.” The unknowing master of ceremonies didn’t know how right he was. We see this play out in John’s apocalypse. The end is like the beginning,…
Read in isolation, The Test of Adultery (Num 5:11-31) presents the reader with a seemingly bizarre ritual, conjuring up ideas bordering on the Salem Witch Trials. Beyond this, pressing questions linger—such as, “Why is the woman in particular singled out, while no test is provided for the husband of a…
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Bernard Malamud said, “The sentence as object - treat it like a piece of sculpture.”
Benjamin Kaplan’s recent Divided by Faith reveals (in the words of the Economist reviewer) that “there was more religious freedom in the 16th century than after the wars of religion ended a century later. The author tells of the widespread use of Auslauf , whereby Protestants were able to worship…
In a Stratfor report on terrorism in 2008, distributed on December 19, Fred Burton and Scott Stewart predict: “Just over the border from Afghanistan, Pakistan has witnessed the rapid spread of Talibanization. As a result, Islamabad now is fighting a jihadist insurgency of its own in the Federally Administered Tribal…
In a Stratfor report on terrorism in 2008, distributed on December 19, Fred Burton and Scott Stewart predict: “Just over the border from Afghanistan, Pakistan has witnessed the rapid spread of Talibanization. As a result, Islamabad now is fighting a jihadist insurgency of its own in the Federally Administered Tribal…
Malidoma Patrice Some writes that in the African village where he grew up “houses do not have doors that can be locked. They have entrances. The absence of doors is not a sign of technological deprivation but an indication of the state of mind the community is in. The open…
McDonald’s is one of the emblems of the bogeyman, globalization. In an essay on McDonald’s in Moscow, Melissa L. Caldwell complicates this picture in a number of ways. In a number of ways, “McDonald’s has been more fully domesticated” and thus has “lost its distinctiveness as something alien and visible…
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