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Writing

Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.

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Motherhood

Home is the Place They Leave

Your first born is a novelty. Everything seems special and unique. No one’s child is like yours. Then, over time, you begin to make mistakes. Some strategies don’t work on the additional personalities born into your family, or they simply don’t scale from a practical perspective. With maturity, you realize…

by Mandi GerthMay 17, 2022
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John

Unionized Perfection

Could Jesus have sinned? Before answering the question, it's best to run through a couple of qualifiers. First, scripture clearly teaches He did not sin. Second, I realize the seeming futility when discussing hypothetical situations. The question of the peccability of Jesus, or Jesus's capacity to sin, is in reality,…

by Matthew CoreyMay 12, 2022
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Grace

The Farm

The first time I saw the inside of a prison was in 1999; I was 16. I hadn’t knocked over a fruit stand or been caught stealing hubcaps, I was just an unsuspecting teenager playing piano for a Louisiana gospel group. One Wednesday evening in October, my pastor and leader…

by Brandon MeeksMay 10, 2022
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Biblical Studies

Its Lamp is the Lamb: The Diminishing Rule of the Celestial Bodies

The act of naming carries a lot of weight in the Bible. Naming denotes authority and possession; the namer signifying that he understands the thing named, and therefore possesses the requisite wisdom to rule over it. God set the stage for naming when he named the domains during the first…

by Daniel StanleyMay 3, 2022
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Pastoral Ministry

The Algebra of Church Growth

This short essay makes an obvious point: Church growth is a matter of the rate of entry into a church relative to the rate of exit from that church. Perhaps church growth literature has long recognized that fact. Yet given the greater focus in church – at least in my…

by James R. RogersApril 26, 2022
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Boniface Option

An Arrow Has a Telos: Strategy in the Negative World

If you’ve not yet heard of Aaron Renn’s three worlds framework , here’s the quick version: once upon a time, being a Christian was a net social good in American society. Whatever was going on behind the scenes in elite institutions, the general rank-and-file perception of Christianity was positive. That…

by Tim NicholsApril 19, 2022

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Science

Sentient plants

R. Fischer says, “The relativity of our reference point can be demonstrated by taking a moving picture of a plant at one frame a minute and then speeding it up to thirty frames a second. The plant will appear to behave like an animal, clearly perceiving stimuli and reacting to…

June 17, 2008
History

Freud and the Steam Engine

Barbara Adam points out that the leading metaphors for nature in the seventeenth and eighteenth century were mechanical. Creation was a clock. By the nineteenth century, though, steam technology had taken over the European imagination, and metaphors of “letting off steam” and “safety valve” were applied to social and psychological…

June 17, 2008

Participatory Exegesis

My review of Matthew Levering’s latest book is up at First Things : http://www.firstthings.com.

June 17, 2008
Science

Replaceable parts

Behind much of today’s biotechnology is the (Newtonian?) notion that living organisms are machine-like. And living organisms can look like machines in some respects. But they aren’t. Barbara Adam points out that the cells of our bodies are incessantly self-renewing - our limbs aren’t like gears that stay the same…

June 16, 2008
Science

Dance of life

Summarizing findings in physics and biology that should inform social science, Barbara Adam writes, “All organisms, from single cells to human beings and even ecosystems, display rhythmic behaviour. Rhythmicity is a universal phenomenon. Scientists conceptualise atoms as probability waves, molecules as vibrating structures, and organisms as symphonies. Living beings, they…

June 16, 2008
Science

Real time

KG Denbigh wrote in 1981 that physics treats time as a simple continuum: “It knows of no means of picking out a unique moment, the now or the present. The t-coordinate is an undifferentiated continuum, and, if this coordinate is ‘taken for real’ as has been the tendency among many…

June 16, 2008

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