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Writing

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

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Art

The Artist's Litany

If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. (1 John 1:8) O God the Father, creator of heaven and earth, Alpha and Omega, beginning and end, who inspired Creation with the breath of your nostrils, who placed Adam in the…

by Christian LeithartFebruary 2, 2016
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American Culture

American Sodom

For nearly a half-century, Sodom has been a key symbol in the American culture wars. On the one side, we have an aggressive movement among homosexuals that has first decriminalized homosexual conduct, then to force cultural and legal recognition of homosexuals as a minority and to normalize homosexual behaviors, finally…

by Peter LeithartJanuary 28, 2016
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Biblical Theology

The Meaning of the Mount of Olives

Speaking of the Church, Romans 11:16-17 says, "And if the root be holy, the branches are also. But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, being a wild olive were grafted in among them and became partaker with them of the root of the fatness of the…

by James B. JordanJanuary 26, 2016
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Isaiah

No Sabbath for God

At the end of Isaiah 61, Yahweh's Servant rejoices because the Lord clothes Him with salvation and righteousness. He decks Him like a bridegroom with a garland on His head. He wears jewels like a bride. He is a new bridegroom in a new garden of Eden, a garden of…

by Peter LeithartJanuary 21, 2016
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Biblical Law

Approaching the Torah

Before anything else, a word about “Torah” may be in order. I have been persuaded that “law” is a bad translation of “Torah,” even though it is evident that what is called “Torah” does have commandments, statutes, and ordinances in abundance. Why not “law?” “Law” as a translation for “Torah”…

by Ralph Allan SmithJanuary 19, 2016
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Biblical Horizons

Jane Austen, Pundit

Few novelists seem as innocent of the temptation to punditry as Jane Austen. Though living through a period that witnessed the birth of an independent United States, the French Revolution and the Terror, the Napoleonic wars and the rise of revolutionary romanticism, and the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution, she…

by Peter LeithartJanuary 14, 2016

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Dialectic of Realism

Frederic Jameson’s Antinomies of Realism continues the argument he made a couple of decades ago in Signatures of the Visible . In that earlier book, Jameson argues that realism depended on “prolonging and preserving - rather than ‘resolving’ - [a] constitutive tension and incommensurability.” That tension is inherent in realism’s…

July 10, 2014

Piketty and Politics

Duncan Kelly argues in his lengthy TLS review of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century that the “book is as much a story about the limits of modern democratic politics as it is about the structures of inequality.” That is not simply about the anti-democratic role that wealth plays…

July 10, 2014

Resistant Rest

Walter Brueggemann’s Sabbath As Resistance is, like most of Brueggemann’s other work, bracing and frustrating in equal measure. He rightly sees the Sabbath command in connection with the first commandment: Worshiping the God of the exodus means worshiping a God who delivers from the demanding, restless gods of Egypt and…

July 10, 2014

Latin American and the Bilbao Effect

Justin McGuirk argues in his Radical Cities that Latin American was the site of the “greatest experiments in urban living of the twentieth century. Latin America, let us not forget, experienced mass urbanisation long before China and Africa, which today produce almost panic-inducing statistics of urban population growth. In the…

July 10, 2014

Oriental Africa

“Sensing that Africa had been cast aside by the West in the wake of the Cold War,” writes Howard French in China’s Second Continent , “Beijing saw the continent as a perfect proving ground for some Chinese companies to cut their teeth in international business.” That Africa is rich in…

July 9, 2014

Platonic Purification

Socrates’s discussion of purity in the Sophist treats the concept in a refined fashion. He admits the existence of bodily impurities, but his focus is on the mental impurities that need to be cleansed if someone is to escape the evils of ignorance and error. Benjamin Jowett provides this summary…

July 9, 2014

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