Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Why there is more to Jephthah than meets than eye It was not that long ago that I realized the Jephthah-story and the Jesus-story were basically the same story. Sounds crazy, I know. But here is a one-paragraph synopsis of both: The people of God have gone their own way,…
G.K. Chesterton famously said that the Gospels don’t reveal Jesus’ mirth. It’s true we never catch Jesus laughing. But can we believe He never did? I don’t think so. Laughter is human, and Jesus was fully human. Jesus promised that those who mourned would laugh. He mourned; would He not…
Matthew 2 has all the elements of an exodus story. There’s a murderous king, who slaughters Jewish babies. There’s a infant who will be Israel’s future deliverer, saved from the murderous king so He can later return to save His people and lead them to the Promised land. There’s an…
The calendar of Israel was primarily theological, centered on commemorating the salvific acts of God, but also agricultural, celebrating the creation-restoring effects of those salvific acts. The feasts of the first month celebrated the reviving of the world in the Spring, and typified the cutting off of the Savior in…
The chiastic shape corresponds to the shape of human life. This should not surprise us, because we are made in the image of God, and God is manifest in Word and Spirit. If we are living epistles, our lives will look a bit like the literary shape of the books…
Back in January, Venkatesh Rao wrote a fascinating post on the Ribbonfarm blog, discussing different forms of models of narrative. Engaging with Ursula LeGuin’s talk ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ , Rao explores her contrast between the (male) ‘hero narrative’ and the (female) ‘carrier-bag story’, and suggests a third…
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D arren Grem's forthcoming The Blessings of Business is a study of the money men behind mid-20th century Evangelicalism. It's a revealing book, once one skims off Grem's premises, which seem to be: Evangelical ministry takes money, wealthy people provide the money. Grem seems to think this a scandal. It's…
W riting on Catholic education in a 1990 America essay , Walter Ong pushed the discussion of Catholic identity back to the roots: What is the “catholicity” of “Catholic”? “‘Catholic,'” he observed, “is commonly said to mean ‘universal,' a term from the Latin universalis .” But this doesn't fit the…
W hy isn't the Hebrew Bible taken seriously as a text of philosophy, ethics, or political thought? That it isn't is obvious. As Yoram Hazony observes in his The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture , his graduate training at Rutgers all but ignored the Bible: “political theory and the history of…
M ikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita has an epigraph from Goethe's Faust , and the novel is full of Faustian elements. Both involve temptation, the Satanic ball that Margarita attends resembles nothing so much as Faust's Walpurgis night, and the romantic overlay to a story of devilish temptation is…
I n an 1851 essay on “Catholicism” published in the Mercersburg Review , John Williamson Nevin unpacked the notion that the church is “catholic” or “universal.” He distinguished two ways of understanding the church's universality—as “all” or as “whole.” If the church is catholic as “all,” then it is an…
W hile Athenian philosophy was in many respects quite distant from the political cosmologies that characterized the great Near Eastern empires,” writes Yoram Hazony ( The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture ), “it continued to develop their view of man as being essentially a creature of the state that governs him,…
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