Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Creationism is debated widely in the US, especially when it comes to teaching creation as an alternative theory of origins in public schools. Every few months, there’s another poll showing that many Americans still believe Ussher’s claim that the world was created around 4000 BC, which always elicits a contemptuous…
Walker Percy died in 1990, but his six published novels and his collections of essays are more relevant than when he wrote them. Percy was an American Dostoevsky, and that was no accident. “The European novels,” he says in a 1974 interview, “are more philosophical, more novels of ideas.” Dostoevsky,…
The Spirit is God’s agent for renewing the creation, for restoring bonds between nations, for knitting together people into the body of Christ. The Spirit is the renewer of the world, and the bond of all relations. That means that if you want your family to be knit together, if…
In their basic physical sense , the verbs translated as "persecute" in the Bible mean “chase” or “pursue,” and that fits the context quite naturally. As Pharaoh “pursued” (LXX, dioko ; Heb. radaph ) Israel into the wilderness, for example, so the dragon chases the woman back to her place…
Seng-Kong Tan’s Fullness Received and Returned is a densely argued, thoroughly researched, contextually sensitive study of participation in the soteriology of Jonathan Edwards. Along the way, Tan deals with many of the central themes in Edwards’s theology. As with many recent studies of Edwards, Tan’s monograph demonstrates both Edwards’s creativity…
The title of James Joyce’s first novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man indicates that it is a bildungsroman , a story of formation that describes the formative experiences of a poet who aspires to artistic greatness. The education described is Joyce’s own. The novel recounts the failing…
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Beard envy is rampant, Serena Solomon reports , and some men are taking action: “The thick, flowing beards adorning hipsters from Williamsburg to Park Slope are driving follicly-challenged New Yorkers to a little-known but growing field of plastic surgery - facial hair transplants. Whether they’re filling in a few gaps…
FJA Hort offered a concise summary of the argument against dating Revelation in the reign of Domitian and for a Neronian date in his 1908 study of The Apocalypse of St John I-III . First, the negative case rests on a sense of the limits of the persecution of Domitian:…
“What do all these typographical high jinks signify?” asks Paul Muldoon about e. e. cummings’s poem about Buffalo Bill in a New Yorker review of Susan Cheever’s E. E. Cummings: A Life . Muldoon suggests several answers: “Perhaps the disregard for punctuation allows the reader a more active role in…
Marshall Poe notes in his TLS review that Catherine Merridale’s Red Fortress challenges the traditional statist interpretation of Russian history: “According to her, weak Russian leaders and their cronies concocted the statist theory - in various guises, at various times - simply to justify the consolidation and enhancement of their…
Jonathan Klawans charges ( Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple ) that Girard’s Violence and the Sacred is “nothing short of an indictment of sacrificial rituals” (22), which Girard finds “abhorrent” (23). Klawans thinks that Girard’s theory suffers from the same flaws as earlier theories from Robertson Smith and James Frazer.…
When the Philistines capture the ark, they think Dagon has defeated Yahweh. Yet Yahweh is a power worth deploying as a subordinate to Dagon, so that put the ark in Dagon’s temple (1 Samuel 5). Dagon apparently knows that he’s in the presence of the High God. Every morning, He…
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