Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
There are many legitimate reasons to lament the divided state of the church. Fleshly pride, theological hubris, sectarian rivalries are each in their own ways modern versions of the Galatian heresy, refusing table fellowship with brothers and sisters for whom Christ died. And denominations have frequently played the same role…
Though Bogumil Jarmulak was not able to deliver his lectures on Jurgen Moltmann due to flight delays, he preached at Trinity Presbyterian Church on Sunday morning, June 14. He encouraged the church in how to deal with misery in this life, and pointed them to their only hope in life…
Connecting with the past within the present is a complicated endeavor. One of the most immediate challenges facing us is that of ensuring that, as Christians, our use of the past is undertaken in service of present faithfulness. The past is not a realm to which we retreat, but a…
Dear friend of Theopolis, Before he attended the Theopolis course on Holistic Mission during Easter term, 2014, Jonathan Sedlak lived with his family in the quiet, comfortable Milwaukee suburb of Slinger, Wisconsin. An intensive week in Birmingham changed all that. Listening to missionary Wes Baker and hashing over readings and…
“What is in the nature of these materials?” The Bauhaus, founded in Germany in 1919 by architect Walter Gropius, had a profound influence in every area of design, from graphics and typography to clothing, furniture and architecture. The institution was not so much a style as a method, its philosophy…
Russell Richey's Denominationalism collects some of the most important essays on its titled topic. The authors are a who's-who of 20th century American religious history: Winthrop Hudson, Timothy L. Smith, Sidney Mead, Richey himself, H. Richard Niebuhr and Martin Marty. Some are broad synthetic studies; others are more granular studies…
Showing page 151 of 309
Showing page 3 of 43
In a discussion of King Lear , David Bevington suggests that Edgar saves his father at the cliffs of Dover by constructing a cosmology in which the gods are merciful and perform miracles: “Edgar stages his fiction in this particular way because he knows his father well enough to realize…
Many of Shakespeare’s plays explore the moral and political consequences of ingratitude, but Shakespeare is also cognizant of the tyrannical uses to which the demand for gratitude may be put. Lear is certainly about ingratitude, the “marble-hearted fiend” that infects and distorts the monsters of ingratitude Goneril and Regan, as…
Friedrich Oetinger was a leading German pietist intellectual and theologian, deeply interested in the science of his day. And critical of science and rationalist philosophy as well. Against thinkers who placed a primacy on reason, Oetinger argued that sheer logical clarity is insufficient “for living knowledge.” Living knowledge takes form…
I tell a joke, and you get it. I include a veiled allusion to, say, Faust in a casual conversation; you catch it; and we exchange a mental wink. Humor provides a pathway into the hermeneutics of texts and communication. It also seems to provide a pathway into the sociology…
Gadamer notes the ambiguity of “keeping something in mind.” We sometimes hold something in our mental “gaze” in order to knock into it head on. We watch it carefully until we can grab it. But keeping in mind can also be a form of forgetfulness. We might also keep something…
Gadamer notes that the concept of Bildung (culture) has its origins in medieval and baroque mysticism, and continues to carry a mystical connotation when it begins to be used of the cultivated humanness. Von Humboldt, for instance, says “when in our language we say Bildung, we mean something both higher…
Showing page 1747 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
