Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
When God created Adam, He gave him both a vision and a responsibility. The big vision was the Dominion Mandate. The more specific calling was to cultivate and guard the Garden. God also told Adam about the gold of Havilah, which was good and beautiful (that is how the Hebrew…
After the death of Jan Hus (1369–1415), his successors, the Hussites, began to develop his thoughts on the theology and practice of the Church, particularly on= the question of the lay chalice. This time, however, it was not a question of whether this should be permitted at all—after all, this…
Imagine a friend of yours got involved in a commune, one of the really crunchy ones that does their own farming and such along with poetry nights and music and art. They’re pretty good at all this, actually. They’re using some really interesting permaculture practices at the communal farm, the…
Genesis 22, the story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac, is one of the more well-known typologically dissected passages in the Bible. But just for the sake of dotting “i”s, here is a quick rundown: The promised son’s appearing was awaited a very long time (Genesis 12:4; 15:2–3; 16:16; 17:17; 21:1–5;…
A Narrative Sermon on Luke 22:24-46 As Luke walked through the rain toward the corner house he was apprehensive. That surprised him. He knew all along that this was the climax of the process—that he would have to present his work to these men before it could be copied and…
In 2004, an article by Slavoj Žižek appeared in Psychoanalytic Review entitled, ‘What Can Psychoanalysis Tell Us About Cyberspace?’ One of the answers that Žižek offers is that cyberspace creates an environment within which the consumer gets to play in a world where there is no God. In his use…
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Hippolytus tells the story that Apsethus of Libya trained parrots to fly over North Africa crying out “Apsethus is a god,” and Libyans were taken in and began to offer sacrifices to him. Then a “clever Greek” caught one of the parrots, and retrained it to cry out: “Apsethus, having…
In his encyclopedic Later Roman Empire , A. H. M. Jones explains that the church after Constantine failed to transform ordinary social behavior and culture not because it was too lax but because it was too rigorist. Ordinary Christians felt they couldn’t live up to the standards, and responded by…
Michael Hollerich, who has done some superb revisionist work on Eusebius of Caesarea, explains in a 1990 article from Church History that Eusebius employed a “similar situation” form of typology that focuses on similarities rather than differences between type and antitype, and draws out the similarities in great detail. He…
Milbank, discussing the possibility of educative coercion: “although Christianity . . . certainly requires in the end free consent to the truth, it does not fetishize this freedom merely as a correct mode of approach: truth is what most matters, and moreover a collective commitment to truth, since truth itself…
Milbank notes that “science and art have always first mimed the horrors to come.” Darwinian evolution and avant-garde prepared the way, for foreshadowed, twentieth-century horrors. He asks, “what may the far more shocking interventions of 1990s art and science . . . betoken for the present century?’
Milbank opens Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (Radical Orthodoxy) with a discussion of neo-Kantian arguments concerning radical evil. In the light of the Holocaust and twentieth-century totalitarianism, they argue, the traditional Augustinian privatio is deeply inadequate. In response, Milbank relativizes totalitarianism by arguing that “European and American liberal democracy has…
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