Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The Paradosis Center at John Brown University in Siloam Spring, Arkansas, put on its first conference last week, it was a remarkable event. It was an ecumenical conference including Orthodox (John Behr, Edith Humphrey, others), Catholic (Rusty Reno, Michael Root, others), and Evangelical (Timothy George, David Lyle Jeffrey). Unusually for…
Naphtali Meshel observes in his new The "Grammar" of Sacrifice that scholars have been talking for decades about the "grammatical" character of ritual and sacrifice in general, but have never actually analyzed a specific ritual or sacrificial system grammatically. Some even talk about a "universal grammar" of sacrifice "even though…
Some Christians are rather breezy about the problem of evil. We shouldn't be. Do I need to remind you of the grisly beheadings that have taken place over the past few weeks? Do I need to remind you of the blood of innocents that’s been spilled in our own country?…
Have you ever been to a wedding where the heavens opened and a voice declared the couple “husband and wife”? Few of us have. Beautiful as they are, most marriages are quite mundane. Yet when Jesus talks about marriage, He describes it as something that God does: “What God has…
Jesus is the last and greatest of the Prophets. He is the Prophet that Moses predicted (Deuteronomy 18). That means He gives the final word, brings the blueprints for the final temple, speaks the final world into existence, and has complete and permanent access to the divine court, where He…
Paul stands against those who are “troubling” or “disturbing” the Galatians churches ( tarasso ; 1:7; also in 5:10). The reference seems to be two great troublers from the Old Testament. First, Achan is described as a “troubler” for the problems he causes in the aftermath of the battle at…
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D arren Grem's forthcoming The Blessings of Business is a study of the money men behind mid-20th century Evangelicalism. It's a revealing book, once one skims off Grem's premises, which seem to be: Evangelical ministry takes money, wealthy people provide the money. Grem seems to think this a scandal. It's…
W riting on Catholic education in a 1990 America essay , Walter Ong pushed the discussion of Catholic identity back to the roots: What is the “catholicity” of “Catholic”? “‘Catholic,'” he observed, “is commonly said to mean ‘universal,' a term from the Latin universalis .” But this doesn't fit the…
W hy isn't the Hebrew Bible taken seriously as a text of philosophy, ethics, or political thought? That it isn't is obvious. As Yoram Hazony observes in his The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture , his graduate training at Rutgers all but ignored the Bible: “political theory and the history of…
M ikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita has an epigraph from Goethe's Faust , and the novel is full of Faustian elements. Both involve temptation, the Satanic ball that Margarita attends resembles nothing so much as Faust's Walpurgis night, and the romantic overlay to a story of devilish temptation is…
I n an 1851 essay on “Catholicism” published in the Mercersburg Review , John Williamson Nevin unpacked the notion that the church is “catholic” or “universal.” He distinguished two ways of understanding the church's universality—as “all” or as “whole.” If the church is catholic as “all,” then it is an…
W hile Athenian philosophy was in many respects quite distant from the political cosmologies that characterized the great Near Eastern empires,” writes Yoram Hazony ( The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture ), “it continued to develop their view of man as being essentially a creature of the state that governs him,…
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