Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I live in an area where Mardi Gras is in full swing, and I can remember from my upbringing that Fat Tuesday was a last ditch effort at debauchery before the pseudo-spiritual practice of “giving something up for Lent” really began. In my youth I would give up some kind…
Part 1: Observations from the Texts (Matthew 9:14-17, Mark 2:18-22, Luke 5:33-39) The precipitating context for the new wine/old wineskins discussion is people asking Jesus why His disciples did not fast. His immediate answer is that you can’t get the friends of the groom to fast at the bachelor party…
Simply, “progress” means to move forward. In that sense, a slug can progress from one end of the sidewalk to the other. But for us in twenty-first century America, progress means something else. For us, it is almost a synonym for goodness. The slug can only “progress” if the other…
I have the privilege of being able to counsel a lot of women who are seeking abortions. I can tell you that the majority of them are seeking to end their pregnancies not because they feel like it would be a fun thing to do, but because they are scared…
Last night, along with a few online friends, I watched this debate on the meaning of life between William Lane Craig, Rebecca Goldstein, and Jordan Peterson, hosted by Wycliffe College. While watching it, and reflecting upon Peterson’s work more generally (about which I’ve written in the past ), I was…
I’m glad to have been invited to contribute regularly to the Theopolis Institute website. Thank you, readers, for welcoming and joining what I hope will be a venture of integration. Integration itself is what I want to explore. And for me personally, this is the shape of my current integrative…
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Prior to the 18th century, writes Mark Evan Bonds, instrumental music was considered inferior to music that accompanied words ( Wordless Rhetoric ). According to the artistic theory developed by Johann Georg Sulzer, “instrumental music . . . can be pleasing and at times moving, but its ‘meaning' is relatively…
Paul's speech on the Areopagus is the second of three programmatic speeches in Acts. Robert Tannehill notes ( The Narrative Unity of Luke-Acts ) that they trace the progression of Paul's mission: “Careful planning is indicated by the fact that we have three different types of speeches addressed to three…
In his now-classic Sources of the Self (143-4), Charles Taylor observes that Descartes is “in many ways profoundly Augustinian: the emphasis on radical reflexivity, the importance of the cogito, the central role of a proof of God's existence which starts from ‘within,' from features of my own ideas, instead of…
Mark Evan Bonds's Absolute Music is a study of 19th-century debates concerning the purity or absoluteness of music, the question of the possibility and/or propriety of segregating music from the rest of the world, music as a sheer aesthetic experience, an experience of pure beauty or simple form. It's a…
Robert Tannehill points out in the second volume of his Narrative Unity of Luke-Acts that Acts 16-19 depicts a recurring “public accusation type-scene.” Prior to chapter 16, the public accusations against Paul and his associates are not highlighted. After chapter 16, they are. “In 16:20-21 Romans accuse the mission of…
Matthew B. Crawford argues in The World Beyond Your Head that things discipline our attention and thus make genuine knowledge of the world possible: “ things that can serve as a kind of authority for us, by way of structuring our attention. The design of things—for example, cars and children’s…
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