Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I live in an area where Mardi Gras is in full swing, and I can remember from my upbringing that Fat Tuesday was a last ditch effort at debauchery before the pseudo-spiritual practice of “giving something up for Lent” really began. In my youth I would give up some kind…
Part 1: Observations from the Texts (Matthew 9:14-17, Mark 2:18-22, Luke 5:33-39) The precipitating context for the new wine/old wineskins discussion is people asking Jesus why His disciples did not fast. His immediate answer is that you can’t get the friends of the groom to fast at the bachelor party…
Simply, “progress” means to move forward. In that sense, a slug can progress from one end of the sidewalk to the other. But for us in twenty-first century America, progress means something else. For us, it is almost a synonym for goodness. The slug can only “progress” if the other…
I have the privilege of being able to counsel a lot of women who are seeking abortions. I can tell you that the majority of them are seeking to end their pregnancies not because they feel like it would be a fun thing to do, but because they are scared…
Last night, along with a few online friends, I watched this debate on the meaning of life between William Lane Craig, Rebecca Goldstein, and Jordan Peterson, hosted by Wycliffe College. While watching it, and reflecting upon Peterson’s work more generally (about which I’ve written in the past ), I was…
I’m glad to have been invited to contribute regularly to the Theopolis Institute website. Thank you, readers, for welcoming and joining what I hope will be a venture of integration. Integration itself is what I want to explore. And for me personally, this is the shape of my current integrative…
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Jacob Olupona ( African Religions , 118-9) tells the remarkable story of Rev. Sunday Adelaja and the Word of Faith Bible Church of Kiev: “Adelaja, a Nigerian, initially and somewhat to his dismay found himself in Belarus (then part of the Soviet Union) on a scholarship to study journalism. While…
Karin Neutel's A Cosmopolitan Ideal is a detailed contextual study of Paul's declaration that in Christ there is no more Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female. “Contextual” here means that Neutel examines the use of these and similar contrasts in Greco-Roman and Jewish texts of the first…
F. S. Naiden is making a career in classics by unsettling settled academic opinion about ancient religion and ritual. He did it in the 2012 Smoke Signals for the Gods , which reintroduced the gods into modern accounts of Greek sacrifice. Earlier (I'm reading Naiden in reverse order!), in Ancient…
Modernism was born in Vienna at the turning point from the 19th to the 20th century. On most accounts, the climate of fin de siecle Vienna was dark and brooding breeding ground for modernist nightmares. Without denying that dimension of Viennese modernism, Kevin Karnes argues in A Kingdom Not of…
In his monograph on The Throne Motif in the Book of Revelation (228-9), Lazlo Gallusz lays out a helpful macro-outline of Revelation, which shows the alternation of temple scenes and visions: Temple scene 1, 1:9-20 (Jesus among lampstands) Vision 1, 2:1-3:22 Temple scene 2, 4:1-5:14 (heavenly temple) Vision 2, 6:1-8:1…
In his very short introduction to African Religions , Jacob Olupona summarizes the creation-and-fall myth of the Basari of Northern Togo and Ghana: “A creator god named Unumbotte who makes man, a snake, and an antelope; he then places them on unrefined earth with one tree. Unumbotte gives them seeds…
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