Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I grew up in the 1950s. This was before the "Sixties" and the democratization, informalization, and general cheapening of the church and her worship. Ministers were Father Donovan, Pastor Eckhart, Reverend MacPherson, Mister (Episcopal) Parker, and Brother Smith. Liturgical speech was high language, sounding kind of like the King James…
Metaphor exerts a surprisingly powerful influence within our thinking. Although it is easily dismissed as little more than a figure of speech, when we attend more closely to the ways in which we use it, metaphor’s importance swiftly becomes more apparent. Although many of our metaphors have become quite invisible…
What is a tree, scientifically speaking? A mere googling gives the following answer: “a woody perennial plant, typically having a single stem or trunk growing to a considerable height and bearing lateral branches at some distance from the ground.” We can increase detail by describing its family, genus, species and…
The majority of Western evangelical Christians rarely, if ever, fast as a form of spiritual discipline. In our culture, fasting is more connected with dieting than worship, the other side of our deeply ambiguous fascination with food. Food is everywhere. We eat more than ever before, at greater speed, and…
A Grammar of Creation An understanding of the visual-musical language of the Bible must begin with Genesis 1. This is fortunate, because when explaining biblical types to academics, as opposed to children, one is repeatedly forced to start from scratch. From birth, a healthy child is attuned to rhythm and…
In an inverse Eden, a land laid waste, one works alone tending the trash. There are none like him in all the earth, inquisitive, playful and most drawn to those mysterious, dancing bipedal creatures who lost earth and left it to go wandering the vast wilderness of space. Humans have…
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In his The Person of Christ (Contours of Christian Theology) (180) , Donald MacLeod gives this vivid sketch of what it meant for the Word to dwell among us: “For the Son of God, the incarnation meant a whole new set of relationships: with his father and mother; with his…
The launching of Trinity House is very good news for theological education. Its program is at once fresh and innovative and at the same time rooted deeply in the Church’s most ancient traditions. This is no conventional academic institute. Its directors are as much interested in the practice of prayer…
In a brief discussion, Michael Horton ( Lord and Servant: A Covenant Christology , 97) claims that for Robert Jenson “God [is] ‘a fugue, a conversation, a personal event’” and gives this rejoinder: “It is one thing to say that the triune God is three persons . . . engaged…
DePaul’s Carolyn Bronstein reviews the forthcoming biopic of Deep Throat star Linda Lovelace at the Atlantic . It’s not easy reading: “Linda died at 53 after a Denver automobile accident, but her account of sexual slavery on the set of Deep Throat is preserved in her 1980 autobiography, Ordeal .…
In the NYRB , Steve Coll complains about the depiction of torture in Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar-nominated Zero Dark Thirty . The film poses as a form of journalism, flashing a “based on real events” in the early frames. Coll doesn’t think it measures up. For one thing, the film all…
The ark of the covenant is a type of Christ, Bede says ( Bede: On the Tabernacle (Liverpool University Press - Translated Texts for Historians) , 20). It is also a type of the church: “the ark can also be taken figuratively as the Holy Church which is constructed from…
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