Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
“13th of July, 4:50 pm. I'm sorry. I know that means little at this point, but I am. I tried, I think you would all agree that I tried. To be true, to be strong, to be kind, to love, to be right. But I wasn't. And I know you…
CS Lewis's 1948 essay on “Priestesses in the Church” strikes a reader today as simultaneously quaintly naive and trenchantly prescient. The naive part comes near the beginning, where Lewis describes the decision to take “a revolutionary step.” It would “cut ourselves off from the Christian past and to widen the…
Imagine a version of the Lord of the Rings beginning with Sauron riding into the Shire and lopping off heads in a mad search for the ring, driving Frodo to flight from the beginning, helter-skelter and harried. While, no doubt, some Hollywood exec is at this moment scrambling to reboot…
A Communist Confession of Faith states that the aim of the Communists is “to organize society in such a way that every member of it can develop and use all his capabilities and powers in complete freedom and without thereby infringing the basic conditions of this society.” This aim can…
The story of the Fall enjoys a peculiar place in Christian thought. Together with the creation account in the two chapters that precede it, it is one of the few Old Testament narratives consistently to escape the relative neglect the Hebrew Scriptures often suffer. While the characters of Abraham, Moses,…
In the previous essay, we saw that fire is a work of the Holy Spirit. The two are related so closely that they cannot be separated. Now we turn our attention to the Spirit's relationship to water. Many have understood Spirit baptism to be a dry baptism, one that is…
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As early as Xenophon, ingratitude has seen as a cause of sedition, and during the middle ages the social and political context of feudalism strengthened this link. Xenophon wrote, “And they [the Persians] bring one another to trial also charged with an offense for which people hate one another most…
In a brief 2002 essay on “Creator and Creature,” reprinted in Theology as Revisionary Metaphysics , Robert Jenson admits that “we indeed need to move conceptually outside the biblical narrative as such,” but he argues that common ways of conceptualizing the Creator-creature distinction are self-contradictory, incoherent, or depart from the…
Is China poised to rule the world? Will its growing economic and political clout fundamentally transform the way the world whirls? Ho-fung Hung ( China Boom ) doesn't think so. On the contrary, China “has both helped to perpetuate the existing U.S.-centered global neoliberal order and reshaped the balance of…
The contributors to Rousseau and the Dilemmas of Modernity share a skepticism of accounts of “Rousseau the totalitarian” and “Rousseau the illiberal menace.” Positively, they share a conviction that Rousseau has great relevance to present day dilemmas. As editor Mark Hulliung says, “When it comes to whether we can attain…
Isaiah 19-20:6 is an oracle against Egypt. It's not good news for Egypt. Egypt will come under a savage king. The following verses evoke the plagues and the passage through the sea: waters dried up (v. 5), canals emit a stench as they did when the fish died in the…
Nikolaus Pevsner ( The Sources of Modern Architecture and Design ) quotes Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, writing in 1841: “There should be no features about a building which are not necessary for convenience, construction, or propriety . . . The smallest detail should . . . serve a purpose, and…
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