Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
"Vanity of vanities", says the Preacher. "All is vanity". Life, we are told in the book of Ecclesiastes, is a repetitious, wearisome cycle; all that is and all that will be has already been. There is nothing new under the sun. What is crooked cannot be made straight, what is…
The Bible tells us that when God created the earth, He set up three zones of life. The first was the world itself. The second was the holy land of Eden. And the third was the Garden in Eden, God’s sanctuary. God told Adam and Eve that every tree was…
In our survey of Biblical chronology we have arrived at the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, which provide chronological information for the period after the return from exile, the Restoration Period of Old Testament history. The question we begin to address in this essay is whether the Artaxerxes of these…
These verses from the Sermon on the Mount are generally taken in connection with Jesus’ earlier statement concerning adultery in the heart (vv. 27-28); the eye and the hand have obvious relevance to the sin of adultery. At the same time, most commentators admit that the principle of avoiding occasions…
17. The eye that mocks a father, And despises to obey a mother, The ravens of the valley will pick it out, And the young eagles will eat it. 18. There are three things that are too wonderful for me, Four that I do not understand: 19. The way of…
The modern Church in America and virtually everywhere else is ideology-centered, not geographical. This is because various Churches believe different things and have different customs of worship and sacraments. The ideological Church has gradually developed from the time of the Reformation, because accuracy of doctrine has become more important to…
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Ancient politics had to do with governing a people set in a particular location; so did the modern politics of the nation-state. With the large-scale population movements of the last half-century, the ethnic homogeneity of the nation-state (never entirely homogenous to begin with) has dissolved further. Nationality is no longer…
Political scientist David Jacobson notes the connection between immigration and shifts in understandings of rights: “Transnational migration is steadily eroding the traditional basis of nation-state membership, namely citizenship. As rights have come to be predicated on residency, not citizen state, the distiction between ‘citizen’ and ‘alian’ has eroded. The devaluation…
The reviewer of Ernest Sterberg’s 1999 Economy of Icons in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology summarizes some main points from this latter-day Thorstein Veblen: “The thesis of this controversial book is that ‘enterprises make their way in the capitalist economy by transforming commodities into icons.’ An icon is…
Discussions of the postmodern self often trace a genealogy from Descartes to Locke to Kant to Nietzsche to Heidegger to Foucault. But though philosophers no doubt have some influence on the daily experiences of normal humans, this sort of treatment doesn’t quite get to the ground level. In 1991, Paul…
Evidence that Fukuyama may have had it right: Walter Truett Anderson writes that “the International Commission on Peace and Food (in its 1994 report) pointed to the urgent need to create employment for hundreds of millions of poor people, and at the same time dismissed the notion that most of…
Psychologist Brewster Smith decries the solvents of postmodern life - cynicism, shallowness, sensationalism, warfare between fundamentalisms and relativisms, uncertainty about all standards, the “fin de siecle sense of drift and doom” (even after the fin). What’s his solution? Find yourself a community that can give you values, standards, a heritage,…
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