Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
For many people Christmas comes on December 25 and is over December 26. The tree is taken down along with the lights and the other decorations, and everyone begins setting the house in order for the new year. No more Christmas hymns. No more celebrations (well, until New Year’s Eve).…
The Ascension and the Incarnation should not be disconnected in our Christmas thinking or celebrations. As N.T. Wright notes, the ascension is "a central and vital feature without which all sorts of other things start to go demonstrably wrong. . . . where the ascension has been ignored or misunderstood,…
“In the Word was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness.” Thus John describes the incarnation of the Son. He comes as the living and life-giving light of the world. That’s good news. In the beginning, God spoke and light shone…
Christmas is all about Jesus. The angels announce Jesus’ birth, shepherds and wise men come to see Jesus, Herod wants to kill Jesus. We occasionally think of the Father who sent the Son, but we keep returning to the Son made flesh in Bethlehem’s manger. Meanwhile, as always, the Spirit…
Christmas is about many things, but one of the chief things revealed in the gospel of Christmas is the humility of God. We don't often think of humility as an attribute of God. If God is glorious and exalted, we think, He must be haughty and proud and self-centered. We…
John famously begins his Gospel with a piece of theology: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Matthew starts with a genealogy. John celebrates Advent with a hymn, Matthew with a list. For John, Jesus is the Word of creation…
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L aura Horak's Girls Will Be Boys examines cross-dressing women and lesbians in early 20th-century American film. According to the TLS review , “The sheer number of cross-dressed girls/women and the instances of same-sex female desire that featured in the films of 1908-34 is staggering. (Horak unearthed 476 relevant titles,…
J oseph Bottum ponders why inductions into the Baseball Hall of Fame are so full of sepia-hued nostalgia. One reason has to do with the life-spans of baseball players: “football players are so short. . . . Great baseball players, by contrast, tend to have careers half again as long,…
W hen Saddam Hussein pushed into Iran in September of 1980, the US was in an ambiguous position. As Andrew Bacevich notes ( America's War for the Greater Middle East , 89-91): “As a practical matter, with the hostage crisis still ongoing and few Americans predisposed to sympathize with Iran,…
T he story of David's installation of the ark in Jerusalem can be told as a series of “outbursts” (variations of the Hebrew word paratz ; see Johnstone, 1 & 2 Chronicles , 169). In total, the verb paratz is used four times in chapters 13-15, and the noun “outburst”…
J ean Hani ( The Symbolism of the Christian Temple , 10) illustrates her concept of “vertical” cosmic symbolism with a quotation from Bonaventure: “Everything, in each of its properties, shows the diverse Wisdom, and he who knows all the properties of beings will see the Wisdom clearly. All the…
Mark Lindsay ( Barth, Israel, and Jesus , 27-28) notes that Barth found little intellectual companionship during his early pastorate at Safenwil. Yet, “his final years in Safenwil opened up occasions for contact with individual Jews and Jewish Christians at both social and academic levels. Many of these were Germans,…
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