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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Psychologist Brewster Smith decries the solvents of postmodern life - cynicism, shallowness, sensationalism, warfare between fundamentalisms and relativisms, uncertainty about all standards, the “fin de siecle sense of drift and doom” (even after the fin). What’s his solution? Find yourself a community that can give you values, standards, a heritage,…
God cannot deny Himself and is unchangeable in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth. He never contradicts Himself or becomes other than the faithful God that He is. And yet: Our God is shown to be God above all in becoming man; our Creator is shown to…
Lacan, stressing how language controls us, says “I am not a poet, but a poem.” I don’t know about Lacan, but that is certainly the case for Christians: “For we are His workmanship (Gr. poema ), created in Christ Jesus for good works” (Ephesians 2:10).
The history of the modern nation-state, and the disillusionment with it, can be told as the story of changing responses to Roman-inspired patriotism, tinged with the rhetoric of Christian martyrdom and sacrifice. Simplifying to an extreme, the story of modern politics is about the resurgence (in France in 1789 or…
In his 1950 book, The Lonely Crowd , David Reisman divided humanity into three parts: the tradition-directed, the inner-directed, and the other-directed. The last were distinguished from the first by the fact that they looked to the present rather than to the past for direction: “What is common to all…
Is solitide a prerequisite for the rise of individualism? If someone is never actually alone, can he ever conceive of himself as being defined in isolation and separation from others? This line of questioning might give some part of the explanation for the rise of individualism in the modern world.…
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