Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Creationism is debated widely in the US, especially when it comes to teaching creation as an alternative theory of origins in public schools. Every few months, there’s another poll showing that many Americans still believe Ussher’s claim that the world was created around 4000 BC, which always elicits a contemptuous…
Walker Percy died in 1990, but his six published novels and his collections of essays are more relevant than when he wrote them. Percy was an American Dostoevsky, and that was no accident. “The European novels,” he says in a 1974 interview, “are more philosophical, more novels of ideas.” Dostoevsky,…
The Spirit is God’s agent for renewing the creation, for restoring bonds between nations, for knitting together people into the body of Christ. The Spirit is the renewer of the world, and the bond of all relations. That means that if you want your family to be knit together, if…
In their basic physical sense , the verbs translated as "persecute" in the Bible mean “chase” or “pursue,” and that fits the context quite naturally. As Pharaoh “pursued” (LXX, dioko ; Heb. radaph ) Israel into the wilderness, for example, so the dragon chases the woman back to her place…
Seng-Kong Tan’s Fullness Received and Returned is a densely argued, thoroughly researched, contextually sensitive study of participation in the soteriology of Jonathan Edwards. Along the way, Tan deals with many of the central themes in Edwards’s theology. As with many recent studies of Edwards, Tan’s monograph demonstrates both Edwards’s creativity…
The title of James Joyce’s first novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man indicates that it is a bildungsroman , a story of formation that describes the formative experiences of a poet who aspires to artistic greatness. The education described is Joyce’s own. The novel recounts the failing…
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In the course of a review of Timothy Ryback’s recent book on Hitler’s library, Anthony Grafton comments on the connection between critique and occultism in early twentieth-century thought: “it is wrong to dismissed the esoteric strains in German thought in the early decades of the twentieth century simply because they…
Christopher Caldwell ends an intriguing article on William Bagehot ( Weekly Standard , 12/22) with this: “To be blunt, credit is successfully reestablished when financial elites say, ‘When.’ Credit is close to a synonym for the mood of the ruling class. To say an economy is based on credit is…
Mike Bull from Australia sent the following, which I reproduce with his permission: “We don’t know how many wise men travelled from the east, but perhaps we can make a guess via God’s deliberate typology. “We do know there were three gifts. With Christ as the human Ark of the…
Philip Jenkins has an excellent brief introduction to the thought of the Indian Muslim thinker, Syed Abul Ala Mawdudi, in the December 24 issue of TNR . He writes: “His guiding assumption was a totalistic view of Islam: Everything in the universe was God’s creation, so Muslims could freely use…
Priests used lots to select a scapegoat on the day of atonement (Leviticus 16:8-10). Joshua used lots to locate Achan the troubler of Israel; Achan was a scapegoat, whose death cleansed the people so they could defeat Ai. Haman threw lots, trying to pinpoint the time for offering the scapegoat…
Some Reformed charge that celebration of the seasons of the church calendar is Judaizing, a reversion to the slavery of the Old Covenant. More the opposite: The Reformed anti-calendar view says that we keep appointments with God only when He strictly and explicitly commands it. They do not think human…
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