Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I was still a high school student the first time I read Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, but I will never forget the powerful impact the book had on me. Of course, as a second year student, I did not fully digest the book. In spite of subsequent readings, I…
Crises force questions of identity. Identities may remain assumed until some event, or series of events, challenge what may have been taken for granted. The search for identity is an anxious one precisely because it tends to happen in times of upheaval and uncertainty. In his recent book, Orthoxox Anglican…
Peter Leithart recently wrote a fascinating short piece about the Half Shekel Temple Tax as an atonement. Leithart argues three main points. First that the Sanctuary Shekel was heavier, i.e., more valuable than the everyday shekel. Second, he offers some analysis about the order of magnitude of the purchasing power…
There is no denial from the careful reader that 1 Samuel 24 and 26 are telling the same story. Perhaps we should say, virtually the same story. But that the stories are cut from the same cloth is undeniable. What we have over these three chapters—1 Samuel 24-26—is a very…
In his novel That Hideous Strength , C.S. Lewis is able to masterfully illustrate in narrative form so many of his insights about the subversive dangers of Leftist political dogma to Christian civilization. Perceptive essays from Lewis like “The Abolition of Man” and “The Inner Ring” are fleshed out in…
At a very practical level, the Evangelical Church has been injected with counterfeit spiritualities. We are a people looking for a city, whose builder may only be in office for four years. Our temptation to veer to the side of the temporal is striking in our day, especially as the…
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Solomon built the temple on the threshing floor that David bought from Araunah the Jebusite (2 Samuel 24; 2 Chronicles 3). What might that mean? Grain is threshed when an animal walks over it, sometimes dragging a threshing sledge, to separate the grain from the chaff. Threshed grain is winnowed,…
These are remarks delivered to introduce conductor John Mason Hodges as the first Birmingham Life and Culture speaker. This is the first of what we hope will be an annual lecture on the arts and culture. Each year, we’ll bring a painter, musician, poet, sculptor, novelist, critic, architect, or scholar…
Jesus’ action in the temple was a symbolic enactment of the coming destruction of the temple. The Jewish leaders had turned what should have been a house of prayer for the Gentiles into a den of brigands. Jesus overturned the tables and chairs to dramatize what lay on the horizon…
AC Bradley ( Shakespearean Tragedy ) points out that Othello has an unusual structure for a Shakespeare tragedy. The main conflict doesn't arise until the third act, and then the pressure and movement is relentless from that point to the end. In the other tragedies, the crisis emerges earlier, Act…
The quadriga - the fourfold sense, consisting of literal, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical - isn't only a “method” for interpreting Scripture but a framework for interpreting everything . Two assumptions guide my reflections here. First, medieval biblical scholars insisted that biblical allegory and typology was not merely a method of…
Theories of language, Rosenstock-Huessy comments, focus almost exclusive attention on the speaker or writer, and almost none on the listener: “Our philology is built around the process of talking, speaking, writing.” Listening is emphasized in “military training for obedience, understanding to psychology, listening and learning to acoustics and education.” But…
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