Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto Me. In 2005, God blessed our family with our third child, our second daughter, whom we named Bethany. As soon as Bethany was born, we knew there was something different about her. Unlike her two older siblings, who were born…
Christian, what is it that we believe? While Creeds like the Nicene and Apostle’s have been fundamental pieces of Christian liturgy and life, the American Church is highly unattached to these classic statements. From this creedal phobia has arisen the popular “No Creed, but Christ” slogan. Such slogan, of course,…
Revisiting William Cavanaugh’s devastating 2009 The Myth of Religious Violence . The myth of Cavanaugh’s title is a well-known one. According to the myth, religion is a distinct sphere of human life and practice from the rest of human social life, a universal impulse in human beings, and is dogmatic,…
19 Then the same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews, came Jesus and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you. 20 And when he had so…
An octave is a repetition, a repetition with a difference. It’s not the first note played again , but the first note played at a higher pitch. Octaves have always marked new beginnings. Hebrew boys were circumcised on the eighth day. Firstborn sheep were dedicated to Yahweh on the eighth…
We say Jesus’ resurrection is good news. It wasn’t good news for the disciples on the first Easter. More like perplexing, bewildering news. For others, it wasn’t perplexing, and it certainly wasn’t good. It was plain old bad news. Early in Luke’s gospel, Herod is terrified that Jesus might be…
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In an essay on Poe in NYRB , Marilynne Robinson observes that “the horror that fascinated [Poe] and gave such dreadful unity to his tales is often the inescapable confrontation of the self by a perfect justice, the exposure of a guilty act in a form that makes its revelation…
Proverbs 6:16-20 lists seven things that God finds abominable and hateful. It’s a rich text. For starters, the “seven” stands out. God loves His creation since it is good; what He hates is a seven-fold inversion of creation. At the very least, we can say that the wicked person who…
The TLS review of the two-volume collection of The Poetry of Robert Herrick (edited by Tom Cain and Ruth Connolly) gives a brief review of Herrick’s reputation in the modern world. That reputation has been determined by attitudes to what the reviewer calls Herrick’s “gargantuan” appetite for the miniature. As…
John Milbank has written that John Duns Scotus is “the turning point in the destiny of the West.” Milbank focuses on Scotus’s notion of the “univocity of being,” which, according to Milbank, treated God and creation as encompassed by the larger, common reality of “being.” On the Scotist view, God’s…
President Obama wants European countries to do a better job of assimilating Muslims. Easy for an American President to say. Much harder for European nations to accomplish. George Friedman argues at Stratfor that “The current crisis has its origins in the collapse of European hegemony over North Africa after World…
Writing at Stratfor , George Friedman offers a sobering, pessimistic view of the future of Islam in Europe: “We are entering a place that has no solutions. Such a place does have decisions, and all of the choices will be bad.” At the moment, he admits, “It is difficult to…
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