Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Place names become fraught with meaning by association with people and events. The name “Wittenberg” calls to mind Luther and the Reformation for Protestants and Catholics alike. Geneva has a wider range of associations, but the Reformation Wall, with its four main statues of William Farel, John Calvin, Theodore Beza,…
“…a mystery without a solution, a horror story without savagery, a nightmare in which all the watches stop at noonday…” The Bestial Gardens of Men Then they will say to the mountains, “Fall on us!” and to the hills, “Cover us!” (Luke 23:30) The following lines by Edgar Allan Poe,…
2 Samuel 11-12, which record David’s sin with Bathsheba and its aftermath, is structured chiastically: This arrangement highlights several things about the episode. It reinforces what is obvious from even a casual reading, that the transition in the story occurs with Nathan’s confrontation of David’s sin and David’s confession. Up…
Medieval bestiaries are packed with quaintly inaccurate information about animals, birds, and other created things. Foxes and snakes are devilish critters; stags, pelicans and elephants are Christlike in their various ways. Of course, the medievals picked this up from the Bible, where bestiary observations are fairly common. “Go to the…
What do Reformational Catholicism and craft beer have in common? The question seems to beg for a punchline. Better yet, it would be pretty good clickbait for an article on Katharina von Bora’s “spirited” contribution that helped spark the Protestant Reformation. Well, this is no joke and I am certainly…
Suffering Defined Suffering happens. We witness it all around us and experience it in our lives. It often comes from forces beyond our control. Suffering is inscrutable; it strikes unexpectedly, on a bright summer day or a cold winter night. We lament and are bewildered by suffering. But we are…
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Jerrold Seigel suggests that Locke’s self has “three different aspects”: We are selves to others “by virtue of what they know about our mental and moral life”; we are “selves to ourselves, but incompletely so, through the imperfect consciousness we have of our lives and deeds in the here and…
Murphy goes into admiring detail describing Thomas’s theory of interior senses in higher animals. Apart from its purely historical interest and the anticipations of later scientific theories, Thomas’s discussion has philosophical and theological interest in its own right. He claims, for instance, that there are a number of interior senses…
Robert Young claims that the controversy over Darwinism in the 19th century was not so much a religion-v.-science controversy as a duel between competing theodicies. At one level, he argues, “the protagonists in the debate were in fundamental agreement. They were fighting over the best ways of rationalizing the same…
Murphy offers an amusing discussion of the question, Assuming a Cartesian dualism of mind and body, how can the mind cause a physical object like the body to move? If one assumes that physicists are correct that physical energy can be transferred to a physical system, it has to arise…
Murphy makes this interesting comment, which she admits is an oversimplification: “the adoption of a dualist anthropology in the early centuries of the church was largely responsible for changing Christians’ conception of what Christianity is basically all about. I am suggesting that original Christianity is better understood in socio-political terms…
In her Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies? (Cambridge, 2006), Nancey Murphy argues for a non-reductionist version of physicalism on the question of the “body-soul” problem: “This is the view that humans are composed of only one ‘part,’ a physical body.” She spends a bit over six pages near the…
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