Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Job appears in the Bible as a true story and it is regarded as such in other Scripture: As an example of suffering and patience, brothers, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord. Behold, we consider those blessed who remained steadfast. You have heard of the…
Thanksgiving is warfare. Gratitude is a weapon. Wield it well. Give thanks for the preparation. The hustle and bustle, the messy kitchen, the endless cleaning, the extra chairs, and stained tablecloths sing the song of hospitality. God desires that we prepare a place for friends and strangers, feasting and laughing,…
We often hear that, along with Leviticus, Ecclesiastes is the “most peculiar book,” lurking in the Bible’s back alley. 1 But it is high time that we retire this old dirge. God has concealed much gold here, therefore much glory is ours if we are careful to read Solomon’s wisdom…
1 Do you know when the mountain goats give birth? Do you observe the calving of the does? 2 Can you number the months that they fulfill, and do you know the time when they give birth? Job 39 We have and we do, Lord God. Spring is calving season.…
For six days work may be done, but on the seventh day you shall have a holy day, a Sabbath of complete rest to Yahweh. - Exodus 35:2 The instructions for building the tabernacle end with a Sabbath command and the narrative about building begins with a Sabbath command, before…
High in the list of now forgotten sins is simony. It was not always so: the medieval schoolmen believed simony to be the worst of ecclesiastical crimes and waged a centuries long campaign to purge the Church of this financial and spiritual corruption. As the schoolmen robustly defined it, “simony…
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Kelly Kapic ( God So Loved, He Gave: Entering the Movement of Divine Generosity , 206-8) explains the various motivations of Pal’s Collection for the saints in Jerusalem: to relieve poverty, to unify the churchto share God’s grace together. There was also an eschatological motivation: “While it is nowhere stated…
In a brief discussion of tithing, Kapic ( God So Loved, He Gave: Entering the Movement of Divine Generosity , 153) notes that the Levites received tithes from the people and then tithed the tithe to the priests “who had no other means of income.” That is somewhat overstated, since…
In his excellent study of God’s generosity ( God So Loved, He Gave: Entering the Movement of Divine Generosity , 134-5), Kelly Kapic summarizes the “righteousness” of Job: “In Job 29:1-25 this man describes, in his own words, what his righteousness actually looked like. Above all, we find that Job’s…
In his introduction to Reciprocity in Ancient Greece (p. 5), Richard Seaford argues that the “debate about the extent to which virtues in Homer are cooperative (such as justice and generosity) or competitive (such as individual prowess in war)” is wrong-headed. Seaford claims that “this distinction may obstruct our understanding…
John Thompson explains Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic violence in his introduction to Language and Symbolic Power : “Instead of analyzing the exchange of gifts in terms of a formal structure of reciprocity, in the manner of Lévi–Strauss, Bourdieu views it as a mechanism through which power is exercised and…
In his Megaevents and Modernity: Olympics and Expos in the Growth of Global Culture , Maurice Roche has a scathing review of the International Olympic Committee’s interactions with the Nazis at the Berlin Olympics in 1936: “The IOC collaborated with the Nazi government in allowing what was predictably a major…
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