Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
If you’re a preacher looking for good commentaries on Ezra, you’ll struggle. Certainly to find ones that wrestle in good detail with the text. And certainly ones that don’t cost you an arm and a leg. There’s a good bit more for Nehemiah, which is odd, as the two are…
Quick thought experiment: try to pretend you’ve never read 1 John before. Read 1:1-6. Go ahead; I’ll wait. Now, on to v. 7: “But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with ______….” What word would you expect in that blank, based…
In my work as a Bible translator, I was recently checking our translation team’s draft of Genesis 8:8, which says of Noah (translating the Hebrew quite literally): And he sent out the dove from with him to see: had the waters lessened from upon the face of the ground? Part…
Just in case a reader may not know Weinberg, he is a theoretical physicist and the winner of the Nobel prize in physics in 1979, as well as countless other prizes for his research. He is also a prolific, lucid, and captivating writer. If you want to read something on…
Colossians 1:15-20 is a famous passage in Paul’s epistles because it is a succinct and powerful poem. It appears even to have been a hymn. Given the uniquely Pauline language — “reconciliation” is a term used only by Paul — it should not seem odd to attribute the poem/hymn to…
Stalker (1979) is a film by Andrei Tarkovsky based on Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers. It shows a day from the life of a stalker, a man who enters the so-called "Zone", an Alien landing site, where he leads people to a room that grants people’s innermost desires, which…
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From Australia, reader Mike Bull responds to my earlier post: I recently heard a pastor from southern India speak, and it sounds like ‘enchantment’ is still as powerful as it ever was (although, despite his hair-raising stories, it seems the best Satan can do to the saints in India at…
An eighteenth-century French missionary, Joseph-Francois Lafitau, wrote of the Iroquois: “The men who are so idle in their villages, regard their indolence as a sign of glory in order to make everyone understand that they are actually only born for the great things and particularly for war. For there they…
Thoughts from what Jim Jordan calls the “deep weird”:In Revelation, the angelic elders give up their crowns at the outset, and at the end of the book the saints are enthroned for a thousand years. Revelation depicts a transition from angelic to human government. Angels, Scripture tells us, are somehow…
Elias wryly comments that in urban societies the manufacture and use of clocks is similar to the use of masks in tribal cultures: “one knows they are made by people but they are experienced as if they represented an extra-human existence. Masks appear as embodiments of spirits. Clocks appear as…
Elias challenges the Cartesian method of doubt, arguing that Descartes scrums around to get beneath all he’s picked up and finds, at bottom, things he’s picked up: “he is supposed to penetrate in his meditation, all on his own, to a layer of his own intellect believed, in accordance with…
Norbert Elias ( An Essay on Time ) writes that “for a long time . . . there were, even within one and the same state, traditional local diversities with regard to the beginning of a year, and thus to its end. As far as one can see, it was…
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