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Writing

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

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Technology

Simulation as Inoculation

Every advent of new media creates the justifiable reaction from some that the necessarily accompanied amputation may not be worth the extension made possible by the new tools. This is not unique to the Digital Age. Lamoignon Malesherbes, the French politician who was counsel for the defense of Louis XVI,…

by Garrett SoucyApril 2, 2024
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Eschatology

Reject Optimism

A response to Gage Crowder's " The Hole in our Hope ?" Already, the first pages of the Bible promise a bright future. The story starts with the creation of heaven and earth, where heaven is perfect, but the earth is in a state of formless emptiness. Yet, God takes…

by Bogumil JarmulakMarch 27, 2024
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Eschatology

The Hole in our Hope? A Rejoinder

A rejoinder to Bubu Jarmulak's essay, " Embrace Pessimism ." Whereas calumnious critiques are reflections of more on the critic than the work criticized, good critiques are always opportunities for reassessment and improvement if they are received as such . Since its renaissance, the biblical doctrine of postmillennialism—or “optimistic eschatology,”…

by Gage CrowderMarch 26, 2024
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Biblical Studies

Jesus Did Not Pray to Avoid the Cross at Gethsemane

Several decades ago, a pastor (and friend) mentioned in passing at one of our regular breakfasts together that he wasn’t satisfied with the usual reading of Jesus’s prayer in Gethsemane, the usual reading being that Jesus asked the Father to avoid the Cross at Gethsemane. We turned to the passage,…

by James R. RogersMarch 19, 2024
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Church Music

Holy Toledo: A Critique of Eclecticism

On May 21, 1604, the cathedral of Toledo in Spain held job interviews for the post of choirmaster, the head of music at the church. The position had been vacated when the previous occupant, Alonso Lobo, was poached by the nearby cathedral of Seville, and Toledo needed a replacement who…

by John AhernMarch 5, 2024
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Covenant

The Docetic Covenant and Phantom Church Membership

Imagine — counterfactually: on the night he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus held up an empty hand and said, ‘This is the blood of the covenant poured out for you. Drink of it.’ But there was no cup, no wine, nothing. If there’s no sign of the covenant, is there…

by John CarpenterFebruary 27, 2024

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Science

Time Reborn

From the NYTBR review, it seems that Lee Smolin is aiming to stretch the boundaries of the orthodoxy of physics in his latest, Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe . He thinks that the present has been left out of a physics that…

May 5, 2013

Predatory Sex

In her conversion account, Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert An English Professor’s Journey into Christian Faith , Rosario Butterfield describes a talk she gave at Geneva College about sexual sin. She concluded that the Christian students who listened to her didn’t realize what sexual sin was all about. Even…

May 5, 2013

Flesh and blood

Tyconius adopts a relentlessly ecclesiocentric reading of Revelation. Every positive symbol, it seems, is just one more way of describing the church. Heaven, angels, stars, mountains, and everything else, it seems, means “one and the same thing,” one of his favorite phrases. It creates some odd interpretations, to say the…

May 2, 2013

Unveiling

Revelation is supposed to be an apocalypse,” an unveiling. If so, why is it so obscure at so many places? Good question, and we get a partial answer by following the flow of the book as a whole. Once we get past chapter 17, with its obscure references to kings…

May 2, 2013

Roman adoption

In a wide-ranging and pungent critique of the theology of today’s adoption movement, Cumberland Law School’s David Smolin points out the differences between Roman and modern American adoption. Roman adoptions occurred among the upper classes, did not necessarily involve orphans, were usually a way of elevating an already upper class…

May 2, 2013

666

Bede offers several explanations of the number 666 in his Bede: Commentary on Revelation . The number is the number of the Greek word “Titan,” a “giant,” because “it is thought that Antichrist will usurp this name, as if he excelled all in power, boasting that he is the one…

May 1, 2013

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