Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Thus says the Lord: “A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are no more” (Jer 31:15). The Night of the Hunter belongs on every Christian’s Christmas list. My family has even…
One important part of Jesus's birth narrative is the presence of angels. The angel Gabriel appeared to the Virgin Mary, announcing that she would bear a son. And then, on the night Jesus was born, a whole host of angels appeared to the shepherds. Angels are mysterious creatures to us.…
I was settled nicely into my chair and listening to the conversation in an undergrad religion seminar, my last required course to graduate. Though a few Christians sat scattered around the room, the course itself was dedicated to poking holes in traditional understandings of the Bible: our readings deconstructed notions…
God’s symbols belong to Him and to His people. They are constantly at work in the world, including the world of film, music, painting, architecture, and other artforms. You cannot escape God’s symbols or the meaning He has woven into the created order. Artists use and borrow God’s symbols, whether…
For centuries, Christians identified Israel in the Old Testament as a single, literal ethnic group, often called “the Jews.” Even supersessionists – those who believed the Church superseded Israel – assumed the clear-cut, technical definition of “Israel” in the Bible is the ethnic group. However, a deeper dive into Genesis,…
Misreading Intent In the opening verses of Matthew 11, the reader is confronted immediately by John the baptizer who has been imprisoned since 4:12. John poses a question to Jesus, inquiring from prison as to whether or not he is Israel’s awaited Messiah or if they should anticipate another: “Are…
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Here are some highlights of Marjorie Garber’s essay on Richard III in Shakespeare After All . 1) Garber suggests that Richard is the “first fully realized and psychologically conceived character” in Shakespeare’s plays. Richard’s character is fully realized because he is complex, protean, chameleon and Machiavellian (cf. 3 Henry VI…
Thomas Brodie ( Genesis As Dialogue ) argues that "Genesis consists of twenty-six diptychs. Building on older insights that several Genesis texts occur in pairs and that Genesis is somehow binary or dialogical, this study makes a basic observation: The entire book is composed of diptychs—accounts which, like some paintings,…
John Wilders's The Lost Garden attempts to discern the unified concept of the human condition that lies behind Shakespeare's English and Roman history plays. He finds the key in the Christian doctrine of sin: The "discrepancy between an ideal past and a painful present, between the hopeful intentions of Shakespeare's…
President Trump started calling his Attorney General Jeff Sessions “beleaguered” months ago. Now it’s actually true. Trump made it true. Republican leaders are plotting with Trump to replace Sessions after the mid-term elections. Jerry Falwell, Jr ., has raised questions about the sincerity of Sessions’s commitment to Trump’s agenda. “He’s…
News reports of the recent revelations about the sex scandals in the Catholic church still claim that the crisis is about "pedophilia." It's not, as Philip Jenkins pointed out more than twenty years ago ( Pedophiles and Priests ). The alliterative "pedophile priests" is rhetorically punchy but, Jenkins argued, misleading:…
My wife recently hung a small painting in the master bathroom. I bought the painting some years ago during a trip to Florida. In slightly impressionistic style, it depicts a rowboat tied to a dilapidated dock. Behind the boat the sea stretches out until it meets the graying sky. When…
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