Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Creationism is debated widely in the US, especially when it comes to teaching creation as an alternative theory of origins in public schools. Every few months, there’s another poll showing that many Americans still believe Ussher’s claim that the world was created around 4000 BC, which always elicits a contemptuous…
Walker Percy died in 1990, but his six published novels and his collections of essays are more relevant than when he wrote them. Percy was an American Dostoevsky, and that was no accident. “The European novels,” he says in a 1974 interview, “are more philosophical, more novels of ideas.” Dostoevsky,…
The Spirit is God’s agent for renewing the creation, for restoring bonds between nations, for knitting together people into the body of Christ. The Spirit is the renewer of the world, and the bond of all relations. That means that if you want your family to be knit together, if…
In their basic physical sense , the verbs translated as "persecute" in the Bible mean “chase” or “pursue,” and that fits the context quite naturally. As Pharaoh “pursued” (LXX, dioko ; Heb. radaph ) Israel into the wilderness, for example, so the dragon chases the woman back to her place…
Seng-Kong Tan’s Fullness Received and Returned is a densely argued, thoroughly researched, contextually sensitive study of participation in the soteriology of Jonathan Edwards. Along the way, Tan deals with many of the central themes in Edwards’s theology. As with many recent studies of Edwards, Tan’s monograph demonstrates both Edwards’s creativity…
The title of James Joyce’s first novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man indicates that it is a bildungsroman , a story of formation that describes the formative experiences of a poet who aspires to artistic greatness. The education described is Joyce’s own. The novel recounts the failing…
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One day, Henry just quit. He had soldered wires for he didn’t know what in the back room of the Magnavox plant for thirteen years, and enough was enough. His eyes itched, the watery coffee from the machine was bitter, the pinups in the maintenance room never changed, and he…
INTRODUCTION When Christians speak of the “holy family,” they normally have in mind Jesus’ “nuclear family,” Joseph and Mary and his siblings. But Matthew begins with Jesus’ larger family, tracing his descent from Abraham and David. THE TEXT “The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the Son of David,…
Jonathan McIntosh, a student at the University of Dallas, challenges Vanhoozer’s (and Radical Orthodoxy’s) reading of Scotus that I summarized in a previous post, arguing that Scotus does not deny analogy. He has a point. The following discussion of Scotus’ understanding of the univocity of being is taken largely from…
Ian Robinson’s The Establishment of Modern English Prose in the Reformation and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1998) is a fascinating discussion of the history of the sentence and of English punctuation, and, despite its heavy-handed title, is a delight to read. Does the sentence have a history? Robinson shows that it…
Kevin Vanhoozer has done a great service by editing the Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology (2003). Though the authors of the various articles differ among themselves, they are all well-informed about postmodern thought and culture and are making an effort to respond from the stance of Christian theology. In his…
In the Summa theologiae (1.1.9), Thomas argues that “it is more fitting that divine matters should be conveyed under the figure of lowly bodies than of noble bodies.” Rocks are better figures for God than ideal forms. Thomas gives three reasons for this preference: First, if “lowly” bodies provide the…
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