Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. (1 John 1:8) O God the Father, creator of heaven and earth, Alpha and Omega, beginning and end, who inspired Creation with the breath of your nostrils, who placed Adam in the…
For nearly a half-century, Sodom has been a key symbol in the American culture wars. On the one side, we have an aggressive movement among homosexuals that has first decriminalized homosexual conduct, then to force cultural and legal recognition of homosexuals as a minority and to normalize homosexual behaviors, finally…
Speaking of the Church, Romans 11:16-17 says, "And if the root be holy, the branches are also. But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, being a wild olive were grafted in among them and became partaker with them of the root of the fatness of the…
At the end of Isaiah 61, Yahweh's Servant rejoices because the Lord clothes Him with salvation and righteousness. He decks Him like a bridegroom with a garland on His head. He wears jewels like a bride. He is a new bridegroom in a new garden of Eden, a garden of…
Before anything else, a word about “Torah” may be in order. I have been persuaded that “law” is a bad translation of “Torah,” even though it is evident that what is called “Torah” does have commandments, statutes, and ordinances in abundance. Why not “law?” “Law” as a translation for “Torah”…
Few novelists seem as innocent of the temptation to punditry as Jane Austen. Though living through a period that witnessed the birth of an independent United States, the French Revolution and the Terror, the Napoleonic wars and the rise of revolutionary romanticism, and the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution, she…
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My Solemn Charge and Exhortation to inaugurate our 2019 Pentecost Term course . The anthropologist Mary Douglas once observed that modernity has witnessed “a wide-spread, explicit rejection of ritual as such. Ritual is become a bad word signifying empty conformity.” To which many would reply, So what? Haven’t Christians been…
I offered the following remarks at the beginning of the Theopolis Feast, which we celebrated last Saturday evening . Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Welcome to the Theopolis Feast, the first of what we hope will become an annual event. I’m…
A friend asked me to write an exhortation for a newly ordained deacon. Here’s what I wrote . In many churches, deacons seem to be menial laborers. They prepare budgets, maintain church buildings, organize work days, clean up after pot luck dinners. Pastors and elders do spiritual things; deacons worry…
In a column this week on David Brooks's new book, Rod Dreher admitted, “my politics are driven entirely by fear of the Left, specifically on matters of religious liberty and social policy.” As always, Rod writes with a searing honesty, but his self-assessment also exposes the weakness of his political…
Once, argues Nicholas Xenos ( Scarcity and Modernity ), “scarcity” did not exist. What existed with “scarcities,” or “periods of scarcity.” He writes, “Of medieval origin, ‘scarcity’ derives from the Old Northern French escarcete . Its original usage denoted an insufficiency of supply, and by the fifteenth century the word…
Leviticus 2 prescribes the rite for the tribute offering ( minchah ). Three general forms are described, differing mainly by the ways they are prepared before they are brought to the sanctuary. There are flour offerings (vv. 1-3), baked minchah (vv. 4-10), and grains roasted in fire (vv. 14-16). Baked…
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