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Writing

Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.

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Creation

Why Genesis Matters

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…

by Peter LeithartAugust 20, 2014
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Books

Canary in the Coal Shaft

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,…

by Peter LeithartAugust 18, 2014
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Children

Parenting in the Spirit

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…

by Peter LeithartAugust 13, 2014
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Revelation

Hunter Into Prey

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…

by Peter LeithartAugust 11, 2014
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Books

Edwards Our Contemporary

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…

by Peter LeithartAugust 6, 2014
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Art

Portrait of the Artist as Aesthetic Martyr

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…

by Peter LeithartAugust 4, 2014

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Technology

Talking Like Grownups

Jonathan Franzen begins his NYTBR review of Sherry Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation by describing Turkle’s unique place among commentators on technical culture: “She’s a skeptic who was once a believer, a clinical psychologist among the industry shills and the literary hand-wringers, an empiricist among the cherry-picking anecdotalists, a moderate among the…

October 9, 2015
Sexuality

Sex and Peace

Sex is supposed to keep everyone so busy that they don’t have time to fight. Make love not war has been the implicit slogan of nearly every utopian project in the modern age. Augusto del Noce ( Crisis of Modernity , 182-4) shows why this is not the case: “One…

October 9, 2015
Immigration

Assimilated To What?

Leave aside the question of illegal immigrants for a moment. Legal immigration is itself a political and cultural challenge. And one of the central questions is whether or not the newest immigrants - coming from Latin America, Africa, and Asia rather than from Europe - can assimilate to American life.…

October 8, 2015

Battle of Har-Magedon

Kings gather at a place called “Har-Magedon” for the war of the great day of God pantokrator (Revelation 16:12-16). If we put aside our assumptions about this scene and follow the threads indicated by the text, what can we say about this battle? One clue lies in the identification of…

October 8, 2015

New Old Christendom

According to John Allen Jr., writing in Crux , the next Christendom in Africa bears some resemblance to the last one – particularly with regard to the role of the Catholic church. African Catholicism has exploded, growing over 6700% during the twentieth century. The largest Catholic seminary in the world…

October 8, 2015

Learning from Catholicism

“The differences between these two major types of Christianity, at the present time, involve contradictions,” wrote Avery Dulles in The Catholicity of the Church . “Full unity cannot be achieved by convergence alone but only by conversion.” Dulles believed that the necessary conversion could only take place if each church…

October 7, 2015

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