Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
[This essay was originally published in 1988. Given the situation that our new national socialists are getting the world into, I thought it might be useful to reprint it here. – JBJordan] The Bible has quite a bit to say about gold, silver, and precious stones, and the Bible always…
I wrote this elsewhere and was encouraged to put it here. It is a comment on what a pastor is. Today, this is not very well understood, and God’s people suffer because of it. There are four professions: medicine, education, law, and religion. Each of these, when done at a…
James Jordan recently pointed out in private conversation how appropriate it is, in John’s Gospel, that Nicodemus is present both to ask Jesus about being born again, and to see Jesus re-enter the womb of the mother. Nicodemus rhetorically asks, “How can a man be born when he is old?…
This is a problematic and much discussed passage. I’ve been discussing it in another forum, and have decided to move it here and present some very preliminary observations about it. One large question is this: Who is the speaker here and what is his situation? Traditionally, the speaker is seen…
1. The current issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction includes a good fantasy novella by John C. Wright, who since his conversion has been writing Christianly. This is a fine fantasy with nods to C. S. Lewis and Antoine de Saint-Exupery, and probably Gene Wolfe as well.…
“It is an experience of our days that the spoken name of Jesus alone exercises an unforeseen power; and the effort which it cost to speak this name is perhaps connected to some faint apprehension of the power which is inherent within it. Wherever the name of Jesus Christ is…
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Danielle Allen has a fascinating review of Josiah Ober’s Democracy and Knowledge in the TNR (3/18). Allen notes that eighteenth century thinkers, including the American founders, considered Athenian democracy a failure, and concluded that “pure democracy devolved into either anarchy or rule by a corrupt managerial elite.” Ober’s volume, the…
Camille Paglia can be depended upon for thinking for herself. In an essay at Salon.com, she calls for Obama to be freed from the “flacks, fixers and goons — his posse of smirky smart alecks and provincial rubes, who were shrewd enough to beat the slow, pompous Clintons in the…
In her book on Constantine’s marriage legislation, Judith Evans Grubbs suggests that Constantine was not trying to “Christianize” law but to give “to the Christian ecclesiastical establishment powers and privileges with which it was able to take over new functions and amass more wealth and influence . . . .…
David Cooper reviews Yuriko Saito’s recent Everyday Aesthetics in the February 20 issue of the TLS . He suggests that “Saito exposes to main dimensions of the embedded character of everyday aesthetic reactions”: “First, they are highly context-dependent, in a way that responses to ark works - which are normally…
I’ve read several devastating reviews of Malcolm Gladwell’s latest in the past few weeks, but Carol Tavris ( TLS , 2/20) takes the prize. She identifies the main problem with Gladwell’s work as the “except when it doesn’t” problem. She writes, “the premiss of Outliers: The story of success is…
David Wootton ( TLS , 2/27) offers a fascinating account of what happened to Keith Thomas who, in his latest book, effaces himself and his contemporaries in a way that places him “at odds with the main trends in historical scholarship over the past forty years.” Wootton analyzes this as…
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