Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
“What’s the fastest route” he asks me as we quickly come to a stop behind a sea of red brake lights. I pull out my phone and map all the options. Every way is red with traffic backed up. Deep down I must be a small town girl because traffic…
Dear Friend of Theopolis, I have signed a stack of documents in the years since we started Theopolis, but my heart jumped a few beats as I looked at the thick lease contract. “This is real,” I thought. “This makes it really real.” Theopolis has been real for nearly three…
In the Edenic world of Perelandra, from C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, Ransom notices something about how the Green Lady treats the animals: [1] “There was in her face an authority, in her caresses a condescension, [2] which by taking seriously the inferiority of her adorers made them somehow less inferior…
In my previous two articles, I argued for the significance of the fact that baptism addresses our bodies in their objectivity. In the body, the self has an existence that runs deeper than our consciousness, decision, self-expression, and action. In washing our passive bodies, baptism seals us with an anticipatory…
Judah is a sinful nation, weighed down with iniquity. They are not the seed of Abraham, but the seed of iniquity. Their worship is abominable to Yahweh, because their hands are covered with innocent blood. They have not done good, or sought justice, or reproved the ruthless, or defended the…
Although we tend to define ourselves by our subjectivity —our perceptions, thoughts, feelings, decisions, actions—we are frequently forgetful of the objectivity of the self as body, the reality of the self that underlies and precedes all of our subjectivity. The body is the site of our ‘givenness’, where we are…
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While his wife Rachel is dying, Manie Swart promises to give one of the family houses to Salome, the family’s lifelong black maid. Young Amor Swart overhears The Promise and asks about it after her mother’s death. Manie pretends he doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Years later, Manie dies…
Gotta love ol’ Tommaso d’Aquino, a.k.a. Thomas Aquinas. The margins of my various copies of his works are full of notes of disagreement and question marks, but still: His toss-off arguments are usually deeper than the sustained arguments of lesser theologians. Here’s a pot pourri from the early part of…
This essay was first published at FirstThings.com in September 2019. Given recent debate about justice, friends, and enemies, it seemed useful to repost it here. A third of the way through the Book of Acts, a man named Saul takes over the narrative. Like Israel’s King Saul, this Saul is…
This essay was first published in The Theopolitan, a weekly newsletter for Theopolis Partners. To become a Partner, you must donate at least $500 per year or $50 per month. Give here . Craig Carter’s Thesis #2 about Trinitarian classical theism ( Contemplating God with the Great Tradition ) is,…
“All things are yours,” Paul says (1 Corinthians 3:21-23). Therefore, writes Thomas Traherne ( Centuries of Meditation ), we should enjoy them as our own possessions: God . . . hath made it infinitely easy to enjoy, by making everything ours, and us able so easily to prize them. Everything…
This essay was first published in The Theopolitan, a weekly newsletter for Theopolis Partners. To become a Partner, you must donate at least $500 per year or $50 per month. Give here . It’s a truism that each negative commandment in Scripture implies a positive command. “Do not kill” entails…
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