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Writing

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

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Biblical Studies

Gold, Silver, & Precious Stones

[This essay was originally published in 1988. Given the situation that our new national socialists are getting the world into, I thought it might be useful to reprint it here. – JBJordan] The Bible has quite a bit to say about gold, silver, and precious stones, and the Bible always…

by James B. JordanMay 19, 2009
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Biblical Horizons

The Pastoral Function

I wrote this elsewhere and was encouraged to put it here. It is a comment on what a pastor is. Today, this is not very well understood, and God’s people suffer because of it. There are four professions: medicine, education, law, and religion. Each of these, when done at a…

by James B. JordanMay 17, 2009
Biblical Horizons

The Virgin Tomb: The Womb of the New Birth

James Jordan recently pointed out in private conversation how appropriate it is, in John’s Gospel, that Nicodemus is present both to ask Jesus about being born again, and to see Jesus re-enter the womb of the mother. Nicodemus rhetorically asks, “How can a man be born when he is old?…

by Mark HorneMay 8, 2009
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Romans

Romans 7

This is a problematic and much discussed passage. I’ve been discussing it in another forum, and have decided to move it here and present some very preliminary observations about it. One large question is this: Who is the speaker here and what is his situation? Traditionally, the speaker is seen…

by James B. JordanApril 19, 2009
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Biblical Horizons

Good New Sci-Fi

1. The current issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction includes a good fantasy novella by John C. Wright, who since his conversion has been writing Christianly. This is a fine fantasy with nods to C. S. Lewis and Antoine de Saint-Exupery, and probably Gene Wolfe as well.…

by James B. JordanApril 15, 2009
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American Culture

The Name of Jesus

“It is an experience of our days that the spoken name of Jesus alone exercises an unforeseen power; and the effort which it cost to speak this name is perhaps connected to some faint apprehension of the power which is inherent within it. Wherever the name of Jesus Christ is…

by Richard BledsoeMarch 20, 2009

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Exhortation, June 20

According to the traditional church calendar, we are several Sundays into Trinity season. Trinity season begins with Trinity Sunday, which is the first Sunday after Pentecost, and Trinity season stretches through the summer and into the autumn, until the beginning of Advent. It is the longest of the seasons of…

June 20, 2004

Eucharistic Meditation, June 20

Numbers 13:32 Throughout the OT, the land promised to Israel is described as a ?land flowing with milk and honey.?E This is an image of rich abundance, of course, but it is particularly an image of the rich abundance of food. God did not choose a land where Israel would…

June 20, 2004

Huntington and Mexico

Enrique Krauze provides some powerful criticisms of Samuel Huntington’s claims about the influence of Mexican immigration on American cultural identity in the June 21 issue of TNR . Huntington argues in his recent book that there is a core American culture, and it is “Anglo-Protestant.” Mexicans, Spanish-speaking and Catholic, threaten…

June 19, 2004
Literature

Freud and Theory

James Woods perceptively notes that the triumph of theory in literary studies is less the triumph of Marx than the triumph of Freud: “One of the decisive changes that theory effected was to introduce the idea that texts do not know themselves. It is the critic’s business to reveal their…

June 19, 2004
Literature

The Original Bobo

Writing on Joyce’s Ulysses just before the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday, Declan Kiberd notes the oddity of the ending: “the climax of Ulysses is a meeting between two men, the young poet Stephen Dedalus and the older ad-canvasser Leopold Bloom . . . . The meeting of Dedalus and Bloom…

June 19, 2004

Distance

Can there be a Creator-creature distinction without the Trinity? It would seem not. For a unitarian theology “distance” is introduced only with the world; for a unitarian god to be at a distance, there must be something to be at a distance FROM. But because “distance” is not of the…

June 18, 2004

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