Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I believe hymnals should be shorter than they are. Much shorter. 100 hymns at most, let’s say. I imagine that this will be a hard one to swallow for most of my readers, so I will attempt to bolster my argument as best I can. I can’t think of any…
Joshua is never called a king in the Bible. Yet while lacking the title, Joshua possesses the trappings of biblical kingship to a degree that it seems warranted to consider him a royal figure. There are lots of reasons for thinking this. In a 1981 Journal of Biblical Literature article,…
God speaks. He is not silent. He has designed humanity for reception of such communication and also to speak on His behalf. This speaking is not simply happenstance. It is not just a curious quirk about humanity. It is intrinsic to who we are that we speak and shape the…
One evening, years ago, home from college for Christmas break, I dreamt that I was playing the piano, passionately and well, in the church sanctuary beneath the parsonage in the renovated mansion in rural New Hampshire where my father was the minister. It was something of a lucid dream because…
I’m a big worrier. Always have been. Some of my earliest memories are of being anxious to the point of getting sick, sometimes for trivial reasons. My mind moves a million miles a minute, wondering what will happen in 5 minutes, or tomorrow, or next week, or in ten years.…
“The sun had gone up on the earth when Lot came to Zoar. And the LORD rained on Sodom and on Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the LORD from heaven, and he devastated those cities and the whole valley and all those dwelling in the cities and the growth of…
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Christopher Warner argues in The Augustinian Epic that Renaissance epic and medieval exegesis share two crucial features. First, both share an interest in history, but one that aims to peer behind the veil of fact into the allegorical meaning of facts. Petrarch’s epic of the Second Punic War and Tasso’s…
At the beginning of Revelation, the Spirit speaks to the seven churches. At the end, the voice of the bride and the voice of the Spirit become one, speaking a single wish: Come, Lord Jesus. By suffering with the Bridegroom, the bride learns His dialect. She becomes attuned to His…
Dennis Pardee’s Ritual and Cult at Ugarit collects texts that are relevant to Ugaritic cult, especially sacrificial cult. He ends the book with a helpful survey of the similarities and differences between Ugarit and the Bible. One of the differences has to do with the use of blood. “The blood…
The Lego movie has a cutting-edge social message, writes Ben Walters in The Guardian : “The film’s exuberant, kid-friendly larks – Wild West! Robot pirates! Unicorn kittens! Batman! – are laced with satirical digs at surveillance culture, built-in obsolescence and police brutality, as well as inane positive thinking. Its opening…
Gary Shteyngart writes in The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (2007): “A knowledgeable Russian lazing around in the grass, sniffing clover and munching on boysenberries, expects that at any minute the forces of history will drop by and discretely kick him in the ass. “A knowledgeable Jew in a similar position expects…
Sean McDonough’s YHWH at Patmos (1999) is a 250+ page book about a single verse, Revelation 1:4. Really, only one phrase of that verse: “He who is and who was and who is coming.” McDonough traces the pre-history of the phrase to the name Yahweh. More surprisingly, he finds precedent…
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