Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
This essay is adapted from my articles in Theopolis’s In Medias Res as a series of Holy Week meditations. Like many celebrities such as Kanye or Beyoncé or Adele, Josquin des Prez (d. 1521) was often known only by his first name, in his own time as now. “Josquin” is…
Sight is a major theme in the scriptures. The church has long identified sight’s relationship to the future fulfillment of the eschaton. As Paul says, “For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face” (1 Cor 13.12). Sight is associated with…
What is the chief end of man? —yes, to glorify God and enjoy him forever. But how ought man–and all creation–so glorify him? I propose a Theopolitan addition to the catechism, question and answer number 1.5, begun in the last question and answered as follows: Earth’s inhabitants were created to…
Naphtali is a hind let loose: he giveth goodly words. Genesis 49:21 Frederick Buechner once said, “We move into the extraordinary by way of the ordinary.” In poetry, this happens by way of a compressed code of analogs; often, two or more very ordinary things begin to reveal something that…
The evangelical milieu of America has often lost a vision of the fruit of repentance. We tend to simplify repentance by asking for forgiveness. After all, Jesus tells Peter to forgive 70 times 7. This verse must be paired with Paul’s scoffing at the question: why not sin more so…
I. The hemorrhaging woman. En route to Jairus’ house, Jesus is touched by a woman with a hemorrhage of blood (Matt 9:18–26; Mk 5:21–34; Lk 8:40–48). The story is one that many of us know very well. She has been yoked to her illness for twelve years, all of her…
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I fell for it. Hamann begins a brief discussion of the temporality of truth apparently agreeing with Mendelssohn, “I, too, know of no eternal truths except those who are unceasingly temporal.” Stephen Dunning ( Tongues of Men ) explains the dense irony of the statement. Hamann is responding to Mendelssohn’s…
Hamann writes, “The spirit of observation and the spirit of prophecy are the wings of human genius. All that is present belongs to the domain of the former; all that is absent, the past and the future, belongs to the domain of the latter. Philosophical genius expresses its power through…
Hamann (“Metacritique”) says that “words as undetermined objects of empirical concepts are entitled critical appearances, specters, non-words or unwords, and become determinate objects for the understanding only through their institution and meaning in usage. This meaning and its determination arises, as everyone knows, from the combination of a word-sign, which…
Hamann agreed with Mendelssohn that there are “no eternal truths save as incessant temporality,” and in this he locates the difference between Judaism and Christianity: “it is solely a matter of temporal truths of history, which occurred once and never come again - of facts which have become true at…
Hamann from “Golgotha and Sheblimini”: “the entire range of human events and the whole course of their vicissitudes would be encompassed and divided into subsections just as the starry firmament is divided into figures, without knowing the stars’ number. Hence the entire history of the Jewish people, by the allegory…
Before God tells creatures to “be fruitful and multiply,” He blesses them. Blessing is a verbal pronouncement that proliferates. But so is curse: “Your sorrows will be multiplied,” Yahweh tells Eve at the gate of the garden, and later wicked people multiply on the earth, long before the righteous do.
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