Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Utopia is often accompanied by such adjectives as impossible, unrealistic, and impractical. In spite of that, it is not so hard to find some renowned people who actually maintain that is a very helpful and practical concept. Zygmunt Bauman ( Socialism: The Active Utopia ) argues that “utopian thinking belongs…
C. S. Lewis was no fan of the cinema. He once described himself as “rather allergic to films” and after attending one he added in a letter to a friend, “Do not worry it shall not become a habit.” But though he was quick to dismiss films, his fruitful discussion…
Noted Catholic patristic scholar, Robert Louis Wilken, delivered the second annual Nevin Lectures at Beeson Divinity School's Hodges Chapel last Friday and Saturday, February 20-21, 2015. Wilken, the Emeritus William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Virginia, traced the influence of the writings…
I confess that I’m surprised by the number of Christians who are surprised by the popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey . Many are simply bewildered by the buzz the movie has generated. They shouldn’t be. This is the world we live in. More precisely, this is the country we…
The newer perspective on justification by faith advocated in various studies in Pauline Theology by N.T. Wright and others, is now utterly relevant to our historical situation. Such work cannot be merely avant garde theologizing. In Luther’s day, everyone was “in” as regards the Church and the faith. We were…
Over the centuries, Christians have fasted for many reasons. Sometimes, the reasons have been good. The apostles and their churches fasted and prayed before selecting elders or ordaining missionaries. Christians have fasted in mourning for their sins. They have fasted and prayed to combat demons and to plead with God…
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More evidence of “poesis” in Renaissance notions of human nature and “self-fashioning.” The first quotation is from Pico, and is drawn from Lewis’s English Literature in the Sixteenth Century : God’s words to Adam at creation were: “To thee, O Adam, we have given no certain habitation nor countenance of…
A couple of quotations from Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning , with a comment appended. He is talking about the changing meanings of “fashion” in the English Renaissance: “In the sixteenth century there appears to be an increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of a human identity as a manipulable, artful process.…
Some fun quotations from Michel de Montaigne, taken from Stephen Toulmin’s excellent Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity : “He who wants to detach his soul, let him do it. When his body is ill, to free it from the contagion; at other times, on the contrary, let the soul…
Slavoj Zizek has this to say at the beginning of his The Puppet and the Dwarf : “One possible definition of modernity is: the social order in which religion is no longer fully integrated into and identified with a particular cultural life-form, but acquires autonomy, so that it can survive…
Joel Garver helpfully explains Derrida’s deconstruction of “presence/absence” by suggesting that Derrida is attacking a particular view that assumes absolute presence and absolute absence. Either a thing is here or it is not, we instinctively thing, but in fact in all kinds of ways absent things leave “traces” of their…
Barth has a wonderful discussion of the omnipotence of God in Dogmatics in Outline (pp 48-49). He disputes the notion of absolute power, power in itself, as a description of God’s almightiness, and concludes (in line with the tradition of God’s simplicity) that God’s power is His holiness, righteousness, mercy,…
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