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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Writing in the 1955, Walter Lippmann already discerned that the US was approaching the limits of toleration and facing a crisis of civil discourse. In his Essays on the Public Philosophy , he writes: "As we know from the variety and sharpness of schisms and sects in our time, we…
If we wanted to remodel a church, we'd hire a general contractor as project manager, and he'd hire the various carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and other craftsmen to do the work. Not Josiah. When he sets out to repair the temple, he calls on the musicians . Commenting on 2 Chronicles…
In his contribution to Spoken and Unspoken Thanks , Kevin Reinhart observes that "in English both 'thanks' and 'gratitude' belong to the domain of individual inner life and using them in a religious context mirrors our Western understanding of religion as interior and affective, as dispositional rather than operational" (116).…
"The division . . . between 'corporate' and 'private' worship must be discarded," writes Alexander Schmemann in his Introduction to Liturgical Theology (24). He explains: "The purpose of worship is to constitute the Church, precisely to bring what is 'private' into the new life, to transform it into what belongs…
Adam Gopnik reviews Frederick Crews's Freud in The New Yorker , and along the way to the review gives a brisk overview of the spread of Freudianism from Vienna to Hampstead to Berkeley, where Crews spent his career teaching. Crews was among the earliest Freudian literary scholars, but has devoted…
For many Christians today, the purity rules of ancient Israel seem bizarre and opaque. We'd never think of trying to observe them. This "disenchantment" of purity is a sign of the power and success of the Reformation, because medieval Christians were still very much at home in the world of…
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