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Writing

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

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Apostle Paul

Jonah’s Pauline Move: Finding Mercy for Gentiles in Texts about Mercy for Israel

Jonah is Paul’s typological opposite. Indeed, in the whole Old Testament, it would be difficult to find a more perfect foil to Paul than Jonah. Whereas Paul crosses the sea to enact God’s saving purposes for the Gentiles, Jonah crosses the sea to avoid bringing Gentiles God’s mercy. For that…

by Josh JensenJanuary 11, 2024
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Family

A House for Me

Years ago, I realized that if my children wanted to feel like their house was a home, I needed to be intentional about making our physical shelter a place of spiritual refuge. I began to see the Holy Spirit as the indwelling person of the Trinity—the one who makes His…

by Mandi GerthJanuary 9, 2024
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Charity

On Parrhesia and Gospel Witness

When the crowds encircle Christ in Solomon’s Porch during the Festival of Dedication, they charge him: “tell us boldly who you are!” 1 They do not draw-up to him to with excited anticipation as they did earlier in the Gospel, 2 instead they flank him like a gang of wolves.…

by Mark BriansJanuary 4, 2024
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Deuteronomy

Misunderstanding Moses

1 In Deuteronomy 7:1-5, Moses wrote: When Yahweh your God brings you into the land which you go to possess, and has cast out many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations…

by Ralph Allan SmithJanuary 3, 2024
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Advent

40 Theses on Christmas

Every Advent witnesses the gruesome reanimation of the voice that whispers “you know , Christmas is just a pagan holiday…” with that sort of conversational ellipsis that does not so much invite further reflection but halts and forecloses it. The claims are several and equally spurious: Jesus wasn’t born on…

by Mark BriansDecember 26, 2023
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Genesis

The Twelve Trials of Abraham

Abraham's life in Genesis is a series of trials. He travels hundreds of miles from his family into a new land, flees from a famine into the hands of a king who takes his wife, and after returning, has to rescue his brother from a war. He's involved with two…

by Donald LinnemeyerDecember 26, 2023

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Yahweh the Teacher

Genesis 1 presents a macro-creation, Genesis 2 a micro-creation. The latter follows the former, for humanity is micro-cosmic. The Spirit hovers over waters, and water arises to water the ground. God speaks light into existence, and by the same breath He makes Adam a living soul. Day 1. Yahweh forms…

April 8, 2015
Liturgy

Omnivorous Liturgy

We stand, we kneel, we sit, we stand, we kneel. The postures of liturgy write “upon the bodies of those who perform it frequently a habit of acting as an unworthy recipient of a prevenient gift” (Paul Griffiths, Decreation , 232). By developing the habits that the liturgy impresses on…

April 7, 2015

The Primacy of Pattern

“When we do science,” writes William Dembski in his Being As Communion (85), “we don't encounter matter in its raw state nor do we encounter sensory experiences in their raw state. Rather, we encounter certain patterns to the exclusion of others. In other words, we encounter information. The material and…

April 7, 2015

World-Making Word

The Creator God is a speaker, who speaks to form the formless, dark, and empty void into the structured and glorious cosmos. As images of the world-making God who speaks, we also make worlds with words. Genesis 1 provides a paradigm, an allegory of world-making words. In the darkness, words…

April 7, 2015

When Stars Fall

NT Wright has insisted over the years that the apocalyptic language of the gospels (Matthew 24; Mark 13; Luke 21) doesn't refer to the end of the space-time universe but to the end of a socio-political order. Edward Adams dissents in his 2007 The Stars Will Fall From Heaven .…

April 6, 2015

More Than Anxiety

Laura Pelaschiar's forthcoming Joyce/Shakespeare collects essays that explore the various facts of Joyce's use, misuse, criticism, and combat with Shakespeare. She observes that “Shakespeare’s existence in Joyce is tentacular and functions on many different levels: cultural, structural, political, thematic, contrapuntal, imitational, quotational/misquotational, stylistic, lexical, psychological, or psycholiterary.” Joyce's reception of…

April 6, 2015

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