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Writing

Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.

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Advent

The Rough Places Plain

“What’s the fastest route” he asks me as we quickly come to a stop behind a sea of red brake lights. I pull out my phone and map all the options. Every way is red with traffic backed up. Deep down I must be a small town girl because traffic…

by Lindsey TollefsonDecember 24, 2015
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Theopolis News

2015 Letter from the President

Dear Friend of Theopolis, I have signed a stack of documents in the years since we started Theopolis, but my heart jumped a few beats as I looked at the thick lease contract. “This is real,” I thought. “This makes it really real.” Theopolis has been real for nearly three…

by Brian MoatsDecember 23, 2015
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Books

Headship of Christ and Queens

In the Edenic world of Perelandra, from C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, Ransom notices something about how the Green Lady treats the animals: [1] “There was in her face an authority, in her caresses a condescension, [2] which by taking seriously the inferiority of her adorers made them somehow less inferior…

by Remy WilkinsDecember 22, 2015
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Baptism

Embracing Embodiment: Baptism and the Nuptial Meaning of the Body

In my previous two articles, I argued for the significance of the fact that baptism addresses our bodies in their objectivity. In the body, the self has an existence that runs deeper than our consciousness, decision, self-expression, and action. In washing our passive bodies, baptism seals us with an anticipatory…

by Alastair RobertsDecember 17, 2015
holy-family
Advent

A Child Is Born

Judah is a sinful nation, weighed down with iniquity. They are not the seed of Abraham, but the seed of iniquity. Their worship is abominable to Yahweh, because their hands are covered with innocent blood. They have not done good, or sought justice, or reproved the ruthless, or defended the…

by Peter LeithartDecember 15, 2015
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Baptism

Presenting Limbs and Organs: Baptism and Sacrificial Ethics

Although we tend to define ourselves by our subjectivity —our perceptions, thoughts, feelings, decisions, actions—we are frequently forgetful of the objectivity of the self as body, the reality of the self that underlies and precedes all of our subjectivity. The body is the site of our ‘givenness’, where we are…

by Alastair RobertsDecember 10, 2015

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Sex in Eden

S tephen Greenblatt writes in The New Yorker about “How St. Augustine Invented Sex.” How typical of The New Yorker , a cynic might say—interested in the greatest theologian in the Western tradition only because he said something titillating. But it doesn't take much reading of Augustine to realize that…

June 30, 2017

Tragedy of Asa

K ing Asa of Judah made a strong start, purging the land of idols, altars, and images, and winning a war against the ginormous Cushite army led by Zerach. It all unraveled in his final years. From his thirty-fifth year to the forty-first year, when his reign came to an…

June 29, 2017

Under the Kanun

B essian Vorpsi, a young writer from Tirana, makes headlines in the Albanian capital when he decides to spend his honeymoon on the Rrafsh , the High Plateau, a semi-autonomous portion of Albania governed by the detailed rules of the medieval Kanun . He and his wife Diana visit sites…

June 29, 2017

Mystery Play

I n his quirky little essay on Benedict XVI, The Mystery of Evil , Giorgio Agamben cites Odo Casel's finding that “the term mysterion indicates a praxis, an action or a drama in the theatrical sense of the term as well, that is, a set of gestures, acts, and words…

June 28, 2017

Oneself in Another

I n his study of The Power of God in the Trinitarian theology of Gregory of Nyssa, Michel Rene Barnes distinguishes what he calls “Nicene” theology from later “pro-Nicene” theology. One of the key issues has to do with the conception of divine power, and the way it is elaborated…

June 27, 2017

Nationless States

I n an essay contributed to Christianity, Democracy, and the Shadow of Constantine , Capodistrias Hammerli looks at and through the Lautsi case to expose the rift between Eastern and Western Europe. The case began when Mrs. Soile Lautsi filed suit against the Italian government for putting crucifixes on the…

June 27, 2017

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