Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The resurrection stories in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are among the strangest stories in all of the literature of the world, even among the strangest stories in the Bible. That is true of each Gospel’s accounts individually, but even more of the collection as a whole. On the one…
As a pastor, I’m interested in discipleship. Christians are called to be disciples of our Lord Jesus Christ. Discipleship has everything to do with the disciplines we walk by in our lives. Things like Bible reading, prayer, and fasting are hallmarks of standard Christian discipleship. The basic thrust is that…
Psalm 1 is justly famous among biblical texts. It opens the Psalter, it’s a paean to the life-giving power of the Law, and it beautifully describes righteous life as a stable, fruitful tree. It subtly weaves the contrasting threads of wickedness and righteousness into a succinct summary of biblical wisdom:…
No book is more quoted in Hebrews than the Psalter: there are quotations and allusions to psalms on virtually every page. And many of the quotations are not passing references but closely considered and repeatedly cited as the author of Hebrews develops his central arguments. Much of Hebrews is exposition…
Howard Bloom is a beautiful hypocrite. The author of books in as different subjects as Mohammed, scientific theory, and the cultural upheaval of the 1960s, he professes to be a “stone cold atheist.” Yet in spite of that profession, Bloom obviously writes as a Jew; that is, he writes with…
There may be some debate about who deserves the title “the King of American literature,” but, at least to my mind, there should be no debate over who deserves to be “the Queen” – let’s give the crown to Flannery O’Connor. She is, however, a very unlikely queen. Unlikely, not…
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God created two different kinds of land creatures, which are identified with two different sorts of names in the Old Testament. Wild animals are classified as “living things” ( chayyah ), while domesticated animals are classified as “cattle” ( behemah ). This is a division built into the original creation,…
At the beginning of Revelation 13, the dragon - Satan - goes to the seashore. He places himself in the same position as the Spirit at the beginning of creation, who hovered over the water and called up the land from the sea and the many other things from the…
In a 2009 First Things piece reprinted in It’s Not the End of the World: It’s Just the End of You , David P. Goldman explores how Western tonal music is able to capture higher orders of time and that evoke eternity. Drawing on Augustine’s account of time in terms…
One of the interesting findings of Patrick Fletcher’s Resurrection Realism , a study of Ratzinger’s Augustinian views on the resurrection, has to do with Ratzinger’s changing views of Platonism. Early on, Ratzinger saw Platonism as an enemy of Christian faith. He attempted to construct a “de-Platonized” eschatology that did not…
Francois Furet’s Lies, Passions & Illusions is a best-seller in France. The little book is Furet’s portion of a conversation-debate with Paul Ricouer. Ricouer put aside his edited version of the conversation when Furet died in 1997, but Furet’s portion was completed and is not published. Furet’s analysis of twentieth…
In his Prison Notebooks , the Marxist writer Antonio Gramsci rebuts the abstracted philosophizing of Bertrand Russell: “Russell says approximately this: ‘We cannot, without the existence of man on the earth, think of the existence of London or Edinburgh, but we can think of the existence of two points in…
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