Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I grew up in the 1950s. This was before the "Sixties" and the democratization, informalization, and general cheapening of the church and her worship. Ministers were Father Donovan, Pastor Eckhart, Reverend MacPherson, Mister (Episcopal) Parker, and Brother Smith. Liturgical speech was high language, sounding kind of like the King James…
Metaphor exerts a surprisingly powerful influence within our thinking. Although it is easily dismissed as little more than a figure of speech, when we attend more closely to the ways in which we use it, metaphor’s importance swiftly becomes more apparent. Although many of our metaphors have become quite invisible…
What is a tree, scientifically speaking? A mere googling gives the following answer: “a woody perennial plant, typically having a single stem or trunk growing to a considerable height and bearing lateral branches at some distance from the ground.” We can increase detail by describing its family, genus, species and…
The majority of Western evangelical Christians rarely, if ever, fast as a form of spiritual discipline. In our culture, fasting is more connected with dieting than worship, the other side of our deeply ambiguous fascination with food. Food is everywhere. We eat more than ever before, at greater speed, and…
A Grammar of Creation An understanding of the visual-musical language of the Bible must begin with Genesis 1. This is fortunate, because when explaining biblical types to academics, as opposed to children, one is repeatedly forced to start from scratch. From birth, a healthy child is attuned to rhythm and…
In an inverse Eden, a land laid waste, one works alone tending the trash. There are none like him in all the earth, inquisitive, playful and most drawn to those mysterious, dancing bipedal creatures who lost earth and left it to go wandering the vast wilderness of space. Humans have…
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A hab of Israel pops into Chronicles for the first time in 2 Chronicles 18. Readers of Chronicles don't know the background that 1-2 Kings provides—about Ahab's father Omri, about Baal worship and the temple of Baal in Samaria, about Ahab's marriage to Jezebel. Careful readers of Chronicles will notice…
B ack in December, Klay Thompson of the Golden State Warriors scored 60 points in a game. That's a lot. More impressive is the fact that he scored 60 points while playing 29 minutes, for an average of 2.07 points per minute played. The mind-numbing stat, though, is his time…
I n Enneads 5.143, Plotinus reasons: “If the First is perfect, the most perfect of all, and the primal power, it must be the most powerful of all beings and the other powers must imitate it as far as they are able. . . . Fire warms, snow cools, and…
P agans called Zeus “Father,” but, according to Joseph Ratzinger ( The God of Jesus Christ ), “they meant that Zeus was like human fathers—sometimes really nice, when he was in a good mood, but ultimately an egotist, a tyrant, unpredictable, unfathomable, and dangerous. And this was how they experienced…
J oseph Ratzinger ( The God of Jesus Christ ) discerns an underlying commonality between rigorous asceticism and free libertinism. Both express a hatred of the body: “In the false asceticism that is hostile to the creation, the body becomes a dirty bag of maggots that deserves only disdain or,…
T he loss of Aristotelian/Thomist teleological conceptions of reality is often cited as one of the significant shifts in the formation of modernity. It wasn't, however, a secularizing move. As David Hawkes points out ( Idols of the Marketplace ), Bacon saw the notion of a final cause as a…
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