Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Bruce Marshall once wrote that every young man who rings the bell at a brothel is unconsciously looking for God. While it is not necessarily true that the inward desire of every man is ultimately a thirst for righteousness, it is true that every sin is the disordering of a…
In a previous essay , I argued that the story which begins with Lot and culminates in Ruth’s great-grandson David follows God’s five-fold pattern of creative work as laid out by Jim Jordan: taking something in hand (in this case, the Abrahamic family), restructuring it, distributing the product of labor,…
Gilder, George. Men and Marriage. Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2023. 1 By 1973, the hightide of second-wave feminism had flooded the beaches of American culture. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique eroded the shores of traditional female roles by naming and stirring up further domestic discontentment. Kate Millet wrote her dissertation-turned-book,…
The Book of Job is a very tortuous book. The arguments of Job and his friends are shot through with truth and error hopelessly mixed together. Every line of contentious poetry stands locked in deadly battle with every other line. As maddening as this can be for a reader who…
More than once in the last 50 years it has occurred to me that Paul might have known Jesus before He appeared to Paul on the Damascus road, but I had never taken up the notion in earnest until recently when I ran into a book by Stanley Porter titled…
The question in the title is genuine, not polemic. I could be perfectly happy to follow an ancient — and what is regarded as a well-attested — tradition. But I do not feel compelled to follow it simply because it is tradition. I would like to have arguments that Peter…
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Words are central to human relationships. We can see only the outside of other people, but words bring out things from within. But relationships are not just words, but an exchange of words, offering our words and getting words back, giving and receiving words. A one-sided conversation is no conversation.…
It was an ancient axiom that truth comes before error. “The real thing always exists before the representation of it,” Tertullian wrote, “the copy comes later.” This means “truth comes first and falsification afterwards.” The “always” in first statement is self-evidently false; the reality is frequently the opposite. In some…
And another thing: Who could believe that you could make a movie that is not just watchable but deeply engaging with basically two people, one of whom says nothing? What kind of artistic chutzpah does it take to try to wring drama out of a 2-hour monologue? What kind of…
Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 Persona is brilliant cinematic philosophy. Elisabet, an actress, becomes confused during a performance and falls silent. Her psychiatrist gives this diagnosis: She got tired of playing roles, putting on masks, and knew that every word she spoke involved some sort of performance. So she stopped speaking. But…
Is it fair to use the sequence of offerings in Leviticus 8 and Numbers 6 as models for Christian worship? After all, these two texts are specialized - the “filling” ceremony for the priests and the rededication of a Nazirite. When we find the same sequence in Chronicles, it’s also…
Carlin Barton closes a brilliant article comparing concepts of honor, sacrifice, and sacramentum found among martyrs and gladiators with some observations on the wider cultural import of her work. One of her main aims is to overcome the perception that Christians and Romans were working in completely separate symbolic universes,…
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