Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Job appears in the Bible as a true story and it is regarded as such in other Scripture: As an example of suffering and patience, brothers, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord. Behold, we consider those blessed who remained steadfast. You have heard of the…
Thanksgiving is warfare. Gratitude is a weapon. Wield it well. Give thanks for the preparation. The hustle and bustle, the messy kitchen, the endless cleaning, the extra chairs, and stained tablecloths sing the song of hospitality. God desires that we prepare a place for friends and strangers, feasting and laughing,…
We often hear that, along with Leviticus, Ecclesiastes is the “most peculiar book,” lurking in the Bible’s back alley. 1 But it is high time that we retire this old dirge. God has concealed much gold here, therefore much glory is ours if we are careful to read Solomon’s wisdom…
1 Do you know when the mountain goats give birth? Do you observe the calving of the does? 2 Can you number the months that they fulfill, and do you know the time when they give birth? Job 39 We have and we do, Lord God. Spring is calving season.…
For six days work may be done, but on the seventh day you shall have a holy day, a Sabbath of complete rest to Yahweh. - Exodus 35:2 The instructions for building the tabernacle end with a Sabbath command and the narrative about building begins with a Sabbath command, before…
High in the list of now forgotten sins is simony. It was not always so: the medieval schoolmen believed simony to be the worst of ecclesiastical crimes and waged a centuries long campaign to purge the Church of this financial and spiritual corruption. As the schoolmen robustly defined it, “simony…
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It's a common complaint that Africans convert to Christianity not for high-minded religious reasons but for self-interested secular reasons. Drawing on the work of C.C. Okorocha on the Igbo, Andrew Walls disputes this way of framing the issue ( The Missionary Movement in Christian History ): “Religion was always in…
According to Charlotte Gordon's NYTBR review, Michael Knox Beran's Murder by Candlelight “asks us to consider our own hearts of darkness, why we’re obsessed with murder stories, why this obsession matters, and what it suggests about us as a culture and a species.” Beran reaches back into the nineteenth century…
The NYT 's obituary for Oliver Sacks mentions that his 2007 Musicophilia was written partly in response to Steven Pinker's claim that music is “auditory cheesecake, an evolutionary accident piggybacking on language.” Sacks “pointed to [music's] ability to reach dementia patients as evidence that music appreciation is hard-wired into the…
In his recent book on Bonhoeffer's Seminary Vision , Paul House notes that Bonhoeffer insists (in Cost of Discipleship ) that we cannot pit Jesus against Paul. One of the key continuities between the two is baptism. Bonhoeffer writes, “Where the Synoptic Gospels speak of Christ calling men and their…
A couple of weeks back, I suggested that part of Trump's appeal lies in the fact that he resists the scapegoating dynamics of contemporary media and politics. He refuses to take blame. That, Girard would have us believe, undoes the whole scapegoat mechanism; by unmasking the system, it energizes those…
The TLS reviewer is supposed to be reviewing Marilynne Robinson's Lila , but along the way gives a lovely description of what makes Robinson's first novel, Housekeeping , an enduring treasure: “Grave without being heavy, Housekeeping remains Robinson's most lyrically beautiful book. The text weaves together gothic tropes, mystic invocations…
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