Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The Paradosis Center at John Brown University in Siloam Spring, Arkansas, put on its first conference last week, it was a remarkable event. It was an ecumenical conference including Orthodox (John Behr, Edith Humphrey, others), Catholic (Rusty Reno, Michael Root, others), and Evangelical (Timothy George, David Lyle Jeffrey). Unusually for…
Naphtali Meshel observes in his new The "Grammar" of Sacrifice that scholars have been talking for decades about the "grammatical" character of ritual and sacrifice in general, but have never actually analyzed a specific ritual or sacrificial system grammatically. Some even talk about a "universal grammar" of sacrifice "even though…
Some Christians are rather breezy about the problem of evil. We shouldn't be. Do I need to remind you of the grisly beheadings that have taken place over the past few weeks? Do I need to remind you of the blood of innocents that’s been spilled in our own country?…
Have you ever been to a wedding where the heavens opened and a voice declared the couple “husband and wife”? Few of us have. Beautiful as they are, most marriages are quite mundane. Yet when Jesus talks about marriage, He describes it as something that God does: “What God has…
Jesus is the last and greatest of the Prophets. He is the Prophet that Moses predicted (Deuteronomy 18). That means He gives the final word, brings the blueprints for the final temple, speaks the final world into existence, and has complete and permanent access to the divine court, where He…
Paul stands against those who are “troubling” or “disturbing” the Galatians churches ( tarasso ; 1:7; also in 5:10). The reference seems to be two great troublers from the Old Testament. First, Achan is described as a “troubler” for the problems he causes in the aftermath of the battle at…
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T o celebrate the centenary of Jane Jacobs's birth, Adam Gopnik devotes a New Yorker piece to the lyricist of the American city. Gopnik finds that her classic, Death and Life of Great American Cities “is still astonishing to read, a masterpiece not of prose—the writing is workmanlike, lucid—but of…
S everal weeks ago, I devoted my FT column to examining the Obama administration’s effort to consolidate its gender-equality gains by hiring attorneys to investigate and prosecute civil rights violations. Obama appointees will burrow in and continue the Obama agenda after he leaves office. Evan Osnos's attempt to imagine Trump’s…
O nce upon a time, everyone knew how Islam came into existence. As Tom Holland says ( In the Shadow of the Sword ), “Whole centuries’ worth of scholarship have been founded on the presumption that the sources for early Islam can be trusted. To this day, they continue to…
E veryone who has sung a Christmas carol knows that “Immanuel” means “God with us,” but centuries of singing about Immanuel have domesticated and sentimentalized the word. The concept of “Immanuel” has a long history before Isaiah applied it to a child Messiah (Isaiah 7). It arises, in part, from…
T homas Small doesn’t think Hugh Kennedy’s Caliphate gives enough attention to the theological roots of the Caliphate. In his TLS review , he writes wryly: “ Reading Kennedy’s account of the Caliphate, you’d be forgiven for forgetting that there’s anything particularly religious about it. ” According to Small, the…
Early in his To Change the World , James Davison Hunter counters simplistic Christian understanding of cultural change with a series of propositions about the character of culture and the dynamics of cultural change. Proposition Eleven is simultaneously reassuring and sobering: “Cultures change, but rarely if ever without a fight”…
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