Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Your first born is a novelty. Everything seems special and unique. No one’s child is like yours. Then, over time, you begin to make mistakes. Some strategies don’t work on the additional personalities born into your family, or they simply don’t scale from a practical perspective. With maturity, you realize…
Could Jesus have sinned? Before answering the question, it's best to run through a couple of qualifiers. First, scripture clearly teaches He did not sin. Second, I realize the seeming futility when discussing hypothetical situations. The question of the peccability of Jesus, or Jesus's capacity to sin, is in reality,…
The first time I saw the inside of a prison was in 1999; I was 16. I hadn’t knocked over a fruit stand or been caught stealing hubcaps, I was just an unsuspecting teenager playing piano for a Louisiana gospel group. One Wednesday evening in October, my pastor and leader…
The act of naming carries a lot of weight in the Bible. Naming denotes authority and possession; the namer signifying that he understands the thing named, and therefore possesses the requisite wisdom to rule over it. God set the stage for naming when he named the domains during the first…
This short essay makes an obvious point: Church growth is a matter of the rate of entry into a church relative to the rate of exit from that church. Perhaps church growth literature has long recognized that fact. Yet given the greater focus in church – at least in my…
If you’ve not yet heard of Aaron Renn’s three worlds framework , here’s the quick version: once upon a time, being a Christian was a net social good in American society. Whatever was going on behind the scenes in elite institutions, the general rank-and-file perception of Christianity was positive. That…
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Late at night in Lady Olivia’s great house in Illyrium, three friends – Sir Toby, the lady’s uncle, Feste her fool, and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, her hapless suitor – sing drunken songs that resound loudly through the empty halls. Malvolio, Lady Olivia’s stern steward and “something of a Puritan,” rises…
David Harvey ( Ways of the World ) describes our cultural moment in terms of “space-time compression,” and finds an analogy with the speed-up of life that was widely noted at the beginning of the twentieth century: “While historical analogies are always dangerous, I think it no accident that postmodern…
In her collection of essays on money, Slave of Two Masters , Melinda Selmys devotes several pages to the celebration of motherhood and its unique economics. Taking her cue from the curse of Genesis 3, she argues that men have always “lorded” over women by claiming all important human achievements…
The cry has come up from our national journalogians at the NYT and the Daily News : “God isn't fixing this. No more prayers. Let's get some action.” If God - the living God - were to get busy fixing things, they may not like the way He goes about…
As Robert Jenson has argued, the big question of religion is the question of eternity: How is God related to time? For Greco-Roman paganism and for the great religions of the far east, god or the gods are immune to time, alien to time. The whole point of Plato's forms…
Despite the distracting use of the opposition of of “authenticity” and “responsibility,” Terry Eagleton has some thoughtful observations on the tragic dilemma in Hamlet ( Shakespeare and Society , 1967). Hamlet’s is a society of “reciprocal human definitions,” that is to say, a man’s identity is mirrored to him by…
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