Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
If 1 Chronicles were a movie, it would begin with two hours and forty-five minutes of credits: Name after name scrolling across the screen, most of them (as far as we’re concerned) obscurities and nonentities and unknowns, forgotten fathers and sons and mighty men; all the bit players in the…
Let me locate myself. I’m sitting on a sand dune, three hundred feet above the blue-as-a-swimmer-crab water of Lake Michigan. I’m so high above the surface that the sound of the waves flopping onto the beach is as quiet as wind easing through a screen door. Around me are several…
My title is too grand. What I offer here falls far short of a full description of poetry. I barely offer a definition. A more accurate title would be “Axioms and Suspicions About Poetry.” Axioms first. I have three of them. The first is the closest I can come to…
In his book In Defense of Food Michael Pollan does just what the title suggests, he defends food. Pollan argues that the presupposition behind modern food science, or “nutritionism” as he calls it, is that humans don’t need food, they need nutrients. To be sure, modern science is not yet…
The early church took possession of the Roman Empire within a few centuries, largely because she ministered sacrificially in word and deed. The church provided services and care that the empire and pagan religions could not in times of crisis. The faithful witness of those serving Christians bore great fruit…
My title, “The Original Murder” will be understood by many readers, if not almost all, to refer to Cain’s murder of Abel, but I have in mind the very first murder, the one which Jesus pointed to when He said that Satan was a murderer “from the beginning.” “You are…
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Samson Raphael Hirsch’s Horeb is worth reading on any topic – stimulating, eccentric, illuminating, infuriating. His treatment of the eighth commandment brings out several key themes. First, he defines property as “an artificial extension of the body” (227), and since the body is a “tool” for the spirit, so property…
John Gray ( Seven Types of Atheism ) says that “Contemporary atheism is a flight from a godless world. Life without any power that can secure order or some kind of ultimate justice is a frightening and for many an intolerable prospect. In the absence of such a power, human…
Bryan Dyer deploys some sophisticated critical tools to establish the "context of situation" for the book of Hebrews in his Suffering in the Face of Death . He uses the "semantic domain theory" reflected in the Louw-Nida Lexicon to identify the variety of language the writer uses to describe suffering…
In her book on Benjamin Constant, Liberal Values , Helena Rosenblatt examines the intertwining of religious and political concerns in the work of Constant and his lover/collaborator, Madame de Stael. Through his early study of liberal Protestant theologians in Germany, Constant "hit upon what would be a central principle of…
Gillian Rose ( Hegel Contra Sociology , 21-24) examines how sociology attempts to overcome Kantian problematics, but remains within them all the same. Neo-Kantianism, she argues, "founded two kinds of 'sociology,' two logics of the social: a logic of constitutive principles for the sociology based on the priority of validity,…
Barth is no feminist. In his discussion of man and woman (CD 3.4), he insists on the created differences between male and female. Men and women must resist the temptation "to exchange their special vocations, what is required of the one or the other as such" (154). Instead, "each man…
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