Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Bruce Marshall once wrote that every young man who rings the bell at a brothel is unconsciously looking for God. While it is not necessarily true that the inward desire of every man is ultimately a thirst for righteousness, it is true that every sin is the disordering of a…
In a previous essay , I argued that the story which begins with Lot and culminates in Ruth’s great-grandson David follows God’s five-fold pattern of creative work as laid out by Jim Jordan: taking something in hand (in this case, the Abrahamic family), restructuring it, distributing the product of labor,…
Gilder, George. Men and Marriage. Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2023. 1 By 1973, the hightide of second-wave feminism had flooded the beaches of American culture. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique eroded the shores of traditional female roles by naming and stirring up further domestic discontentment. Kate Millet wrote her dissertation-turned-book,…
The Book of Job is a very tortuous book. The arguments of Job and his friends are shot through with truth and error hopelessly mixed together. Every line of contentious poetry stands locked in deadly battle with every other line. As maddening as this can be for a reader who…
More than once in the last 50 years it has occurred to me that Paul might have known Jesus before He appeared to Paul on the Damascus road, but I had never taken up the notion in earnest until recently when I ran into a book by Stanley Porter titled…
The question in the title is genuine, not polemic. I could be perfectly happy to follow an ancient — and what is regarded as a well-attested — tradition. But I do not feel compelled to follow it simply because it is tradition. I would like to have arguments that Peter…
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Knowing follows the “dynamic of dance,” writes Esther Lightcap Meek ( A Little Manual for Knowing , 79). The knower and the reality to be known are partners, each one off balance at a particular moment but sustaining “an ongoing, overall balance” (80), engaged in a personal etiquette of overture…
The essays on art collected in Tikkun Olam originated from Gillian Rose’s “broken middle,” writes editor Jason Goroncy. He includes a long quotation from a Rowan Williams essay on Job to explain. Williams writes, “Mere resignation is a betrayal; structuring and explanation is a blasphemy. What is left, then, if…
Jesus’ letter to Pergamum mentions Balaam and Balak (Revelation 2:14), and that is a signal that the whole message is running along the lines of Numbers 22-25. The death of the high priest is a sacrificial moment in the life of Israel. According to the rules of the cities of…
It’s easy for Christians to become frustrated with the state of the world, but frustration is ineffective and perhaps dangerous public stance. Over at Comment , I prescribe an antidote to frustration - a public stance infused with the theological virtues.
In a highly provocative VT article from 2009, Leigh M. Trevaskis points to the emphasis on Sabbath in Leviticus 23 and 25. All but one festival day is either on a date that is a multiple of seven, or on the day just after. The exception is the day of…
Leigh Trevaskis offers an intriguing, helpful discussion of the man stoned for blasphemy in Leviticus 24. Recent commentators have emphasized the “mixed” character of the blasphemer - son of an Israelite mother and an Egyptian father. While acknowledging the importance of that feature of the story, Trevaskis thinks that the…
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