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Writing

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

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Soothing Pain is not Enough

In Infantilised: How Our Culture Killed Adulthood (2024), Keith Hayward says that we live in a “therapy culture.” This is “a way of thinking” about upbringing and education “when the values and language of counseling and psychotherapy break out from the clinical setting and take hold within the cultural imagination…

by Bogumil JarmulakJune 5, 2025
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Biblical Theology

Sarah, Abraham’s Helper

In Genesis 20:13, Abraham reveals that when he and his wife left their father’s house, he asked Sarah to call him her brother, not her husband. Abraham looked ahead to the land before them, a land full of violence, and he didn’t trust men there. He believed they would see…

by Donald LinnemeyerJune 3, 2025
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Biblical Studies

Why You Should Read the Biblical Languages

Introduction I am sitting in a rural village in the northern part of a West African country. I’m in the courtyard of an imam. Two other Christians are with me. It’s hot and dusty, but we have come to read Scripture and talk together. As a local Christian takes the…

by Calvin HaysMay 29, 2025
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On Merriment

This is the wey to al good aventure; Be glad, thou reder, and thy sorwe of-caste -Geoffrey Chaucer, The Parlement of Foulys, 131–132 In January I had the honor and delight of speaking at the Church of the Redeemer’s 2025 Christendom Lectures. What follows are drawn from the notes for…

by Mark BriansMay 27, 2025
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Galatians

The Letter: A Fictional Account of the Writing of Galatians

I had often heard that wisdom is visible in the countenance and I thought that I had seen examples of it in the past. But the man who stood before me, loosely holding the reins of the mare and peering around him with sharp interest, gave no outward hint of…

by Christian LeithartMay 22, 2025
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Revelation

Satan’s Final Throne Room Accusation

And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light — 1 Corinthians 11:14 In Revelation 5:2, the first of three “Mighty Angels” appears before the throne of God and preaches in a great voice, asking, “Who is worthy to open the book, and to loose the…

by Ryan SpencerMay 20, 2025

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The Church and Civil Power

The church’s stance with regard to civil order is neatly articulated in Romans, provided we read chapters 12-13 together. Romans 13 makes it clear that God has given rulers the sword, and that they are to use it for just vengeance. They bear the sword to punish evildoers and to…

May 17, 2017
Liberalism

Limitless Liberalism

D espite its claims to the contrary, Patrick Deneen writes in a 2014 piece in The American Conservative , “liberalism was never about ‘limited' government” or curbing absolutism. Rather, liberalism is about “the pursuit and exercise of potentially limitless power toward seemingly ‘limited' ends of securing Rights.” The limitation on…

May 16, 2017

Greatening Greatness

I n David's final speech (1 Chronicles 29), he offers a fivefold praise of God's perfections (v. 11): Yours is . . . 1. Greatness ( gedolah ) 2. Power ( giburah , related to gibbor , “mighty man”) 3. Glory 4. Victory 5. Majesty He adds an expansive note…

May 16, 2017

That Old Capitalist Religion

P atrick Murray's essay in Culmination of Capital lays out sixfold aim of Marx's Capital : to present and examine in the form of a systematic dialectic the social forms constitutive of the capitalist order, beginning with the (generalized) commodity; to expose capitalist society, in its enlightened secularism, to be…

May 15, 2017

Parents as Strangers

I n the Divine Institutes , Lactantius takes on Plato's endorsement of common property. He makes a grudging admission that it might be “supported so long as it appears to refer only to money.” After all, “everyone should be wise enough to despise money!” (translation from From Irenaeus to Grotius…

May 12, 2017

Justice Christianized

“W e dismiss what philosophers take to be the fundamental exercise of justice,” writes Ambrose in his Christianized Ciceronian treatise de officiis (translation, F rom Irenaeus to Grotius , 84-5). According to Ambrose's summary, philosophical justice takes as “the primary criterion . . . that we do no harm except…

May 12, 2017

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