Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The Christian tradition has always had an uneasy relationship with the materiality of creation. Dirt, liquid, sex, blood, and bodies—the world and the flesh stand in company with the Devil as two of the three great enemies of the saints. Mundus, caro, et diabolus , as the old Latin saying…
Since the destruction of Jerusalem was an event of earth-shattering covenantal significance, what might be the meaning of the subsequent tragic events at the desert fortress of Masada? In Hebrew, the name Masada means “strong foundation or support,” from a root meaning “to hunt, lie in wait for prey.” Located…
Take a long look at the photo above. To whom is this woman praying? It is hard to tell, isn’t it? Suppose we watch her for a while. We may see her bow low to the floor. Her lips may move, though perhaps it is too low for us to…
Psalm 137 is widely regarded as one of the meanest of the imprecatory psalms. Certainly as we read it it is seems to be a song of pure vengeance. The exiles in Babylon, in grief over the judgment that Babylon has brought upon them, pray for the destruction of that…
Forty men and women came from all over the United States to attend the 2018 Trinity Term course at Theopolis. Pastors, students, teachers, an electrician, a city planner, and others from a variety of denominations spent five days at Beeson Divinity School studying covenant epistemology under the tutelage of philosopher…
Matthew records that Jesus "withdrew" to Galilee to begin His public ministry there after He "heard that John had been delivered up" (Mt. 4:12). Matthew’s typically matter-of-fact style veils the truly remarkable character of Jesus’ withdrawal. Matthew has been presenting Jesus as the Messiah, the Seed of Abraham and Son…
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So, this is a moment of dialog with myself. I have been musing on Bakhtin and Dostoevsky, so the self-division seems appropriate. I have charged that Dostoevsky’s Christ is an ineffectual liberal Christ, using The Idiot as exhibit #1. But Diane Thompson’s essay on the biblical word in Dostoevsky’s poetics…
Milbank suggests that Berkeley makes some important breakthroughs in working out a Christian understanding of language and of a creation made by the Logos (“Theological Without Substance,” Journal of Literature and Theology 2:2 [1988]). Berkeley imagines a metaphysics without substance, but, because he believes in a God who communicates in…
In his famed “culinary triangle” (see Food and Culture: A Reader ) Claude Levi-Strauss suggested a triple classification of food: raw, cooked, and rotten. Raw is the natural state; cooked is a cultural transformation of nature, and rotten is a natural transformation. Those formed the corners of a triangle. Along…
I offer a meditation on Jesus’ entry into the silence of the grave at the Trinity House site. Click here .
Jezebel and her children are ostensibly the ones who are obsessed with the “deep things ( bathea ) of Satan” (Revelation 3:24). That fits into the letter to Thyatira in various ways. For starters, Jehu accused Jezebel of being involved in sorcery (2 Kings 9:22), and the church’s counterpart to…
David Thomson (at TNR ) thinks that Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death, and his legacy of acting, raises some fundamental questions about what we take as entertainment these days: “No movie actor has risked so much on despondency. This is not to say that every film star has been single-mindedly happy:…
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