Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
[This essay was originally published in 1988. Given the situation that our new national socialists are getting the world into, I thought it might be useful to reprint it here. – JBJordan] The Bible has quite a bit to say about gold, silver, and precious stones, and the Bible always…
I wrote this elsewhere and was encouraged to put it here. It is a comment on what a pastor is. Today, this is not very well understood, and God’s people suffer because of it. There are four professions: medicine, education, law, and religion. Each of these, when done at a…
James Jordan recently pointed out in private conversation how appropriate it is, in John’s Gospel, that Nicodemus is present both to ask Jesus about being born again, and to see Jesus re-enter the womb of the mother. Nicodemus rhetorically asks, “How can a man be born when he is old?…
This is a problematic and much discussed passage. I’ve been discussing it in another forum, and have decided to move it here and present some very preliminary observations about it. One large question is this: Who is the speaker here and what is his situation? Traditionally, the speaker is seen…
1. The current issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction includes a good fantasy novella by John C. Wright, who since his conversion has been writing Christianly. This is a fine fantasy with nods to C. S. Lewis and Antoine de Saint-Exupery, and probably Gene Wolfe as well.…
“It is an experience of our days that the spoken name of Jesus alone exercises an unforeseen power; and the effort which it cost to speak this name is perhaps connected to some faint apprehension of the power which is inherent within it. Wherever the name of Jesus Christ is…
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Solomon’s prayer at the temple dedication (1 Kings 8) is a prayer about prayer. It’s a prayer that future prayers will be heard. His petitions take the form: “When Israel suffers from X, and turns to You in Your house, deliver them from X.” Solomon’s petitions for future petitions repeatedly…
A malar of Metz’s On the Liturgy , recently published in a handsome two-volume Latin-English edition in the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, represents the kind of “mysteriological” piety against which modern liturgical scholars like Bouyer and Schmemann fulminated. For Amalar, every moment and movement of the liturgy symbolizes some event…
In a NYRB review of Justin Steinberg’s Dante and the Limits of Law , Robert Pogue Harrison pinpoints why the Comedy is so disquieting. Steinberg’s book shows how thoroughly the Comedy is indebted to medieval conceptions of law and punishment, and thus how much Dante’s poem is an effort to…
Dave Eggers’s latest novel takes its lengthy title from the prophet Zechariah: Your Fathers, where are they? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? The novel is inverted Kafka, as if K. had been able to tie down his interrogators and depose them. Thomas, a disturbed and disappointed young man,…
As Carlos Eire has documents ( War Against the Idols ), some Reformation iconoclasts were motivated by a spiritualizing piety that denied that God could be encountered in material things. Some, but not all. Some opposed images for precisely the opposite reasons. There is something of the spiritualizing tendency in…
Hosea 2 offers a lovely evocation of a new exodus and new covenant. After Yahweh threatens to destroy Israel’s vines and fig trees because she has prostituted herself with the Baal’s (2:9-13), He promises to lure her into the wilderness, take her to the vineyards where she will sing the…
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