Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
When Jesus says in the farewell discourse that his disciples know the way to where He is going, Thomas replies: “We do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus answers Thomas, but He gives Thomas more than he asked : “I am the way,…
Through the pandemic we learned a lot about infections, how to catch them, what’s contagious, how to protect yourself from getting the infection. I learned a lot of new terms, like “social distancing,” “ppe” (personal protective equipment), N95 masks, and so on. We’ve seen that people are willing to go…
In Genesis 9:20, Noah is called “a man of the soil”. This phrase is a bit of a shock in the Hebrew; though it’s made up of two very common words - 'ish is “man” and 'adamah is “soil” or “ground” - these two words are never used together before…
Harold Bloom’s discussion of Twelfth Night in his Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is, as would be expected, insightful. It displays his deep love of poetry, and includes some truly eloquent descriptions of Orsino: “that sublimely outrageous lover of love” and “amiable erotic lunacy.” Bloom is worth reading just…
There have been times when Evangelicals, in an attempt to be clear about the errors of Rome and Constantinople concerning Mary, have been so denigrating of the mother of our Lord that they sounded more like cut and pasted lines from the Babylonian Talmud than they did disciples of Mary’s…
Awe is the phenomena experienced when one looks up and lights upon the height, majesty, and mystery of the California Redwoods. It appears the trees pierce heaven itself. Among these giant organisms are the Sequoia–while they are shorter in form, they reserve a width that spans an automobile. These trees…
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Richard Jenkyns reviews Susan Ruden’s The Golden Ass in the current TLS . He highlights the oddity of Apuleius’s Latin style: “He did the things that classic Latin style had eschewed. He liked loosely hanging clauses, symmetries, echoing phrases, rocking rhythms and hints of rhyme. At the start of The…
In a letter to the TLS , Ohio State’s Hannibal Hamlin celebrates Tobit’s dog: “the only domestic pet in the Bible is the dog in the Book of Tobit. His presence in the story is entirely gratuitous but also entirely positive, keeping his master, Tobit’s son Tobias, company as he…
Is the fact that God reveals Himself in human language a “paradox”? It might seem so. God is incomprehensible, and always exceeds our conceptualizations and verbalizations of Him. To attempt to render this incomprehensible God into human language, with its limits and ambiguities, seems impossible. Yet God does it. Hence,…
Lutherans aren’t supposed to have a doctrine of sanctification. Nobody told Luther ( Larger Catechism , on the Apostles Creed, 51-53.): “I believe that there is upon earth a little holy group and congregation of pure saints, under one head, even Christ, called together by the Holy Ghost in one…
Following some insights from John Paul II, I reflect on the crucial importance of the early chapters of Genesis for Christian analysis of culture at Firstthings.com .
Richard Hays gave a wonderful lecture on the creeds and the gospels at the Trinity School of Ministry conference. A few highlights: 1) From Matthew, he pointed to the fact that people bow to/worship Jesus seven times in the gospel. This might be taken as no more than civil worship,…
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