Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I grew up in the 1950s. This was before the "Sixties" and the democratization, informalization, and general cheapening of the church and her worship. Ministers were Father Donovan, Pastor Eckhart, Reverend MacPherson, Mister (Episcopal) Parker, and Brother Smith. Liturgical speech was high language, sounding kind of like the King James…
Metaphor exerts a surprisingly powerful influence within our thinking. Although it is easily dismissed as little more than a figure of speech, when we attend more closely to the ways in which we use it, metaphor’s importance swiftly becomes more apparent. Although many of our metaphors have become quite invisible…
What is a tree, scientifically speaking? A mere googling gives the following answer: “a woody perennial plant, typically having a single stem or trunk growing to a considerable height and bearing lateral branches at some distance from the ground.” We can increase detail by describing its family, genus, species and…
The majority of Western evangelical Christians rarely, if ever, fast as a form of spiritual discipline. In our culture, fasting is more connected with dieting than worship, the other side of our deeply ambiguous fascination with food. Food is everywhere. We eat more than ever before, at greater speed, and…
A Grammar of Creation An understanding of the visual-musical language of the Bible must begin with Genesis 1. This is fortunate, because when explaining biblical types to academics, as opposed to children, one is repeatedly forced to start from scratch. From birth, a healthy child is attuned to rhythm and…
In an inverse Eden, a land laid waste, one works alone tending the trash. There are none like him in all the earth, inquisitive, playful and most drawn to those mysterious, dancing bipedal creatures who lost earth and left it to go wandering the vast wilderness of space. Humans have…
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A 2011 article in the Bulletin for Biblical Research attempts to identify the modern names for the gemstones that are found in the Septuagint. James Harrell, a geologist at the University of Toledo, explains some of the complications. It won’t do, he argues, to try to identify the Hebrew names…
Deborah and Barak go out to fight, and the people of Meroz refuse to join them. In Deborah’s song (Judges 5), Yahweh’s angel curses Meroz in staggering terms: “Curse you bitterly the inhabitants thereof; because they came not to the help of the Lord, to the help of the Lord…
Harold Bloom argued in his American Religion that Mormonism was the quintessential American religion. Bloom had his own Gnostic reasons for saying that, but his basic point finds confirmation in Eran Shalev’s American Zion . Shalev presents Mormonism as a convergence of at least two American trends. On the one…
In her study of Tudor-Stuart notions of metaphor ( Translating Investments ), Judith Anderson explores the significance of nominal sentences - sentences without verbs, much used in ancient languages but rare in English. Does a nominal sentence imply a copulative verb of being? Or is it expressing some other sort…
There’s a certain common-sense logic to the notion that we have to begin our efforts toward unity and catholicity within our own group. First get all Lutherans could get together, and all Anglicans, and all Presbyterians, and then maybe we’d be ready to talk about getting those bundled churches together…
One of the great evils of Protestant tribalism is the impact it has on our prayers. There’s no way to tell, but I suspect that few Protestant churches, especially Evangelical churches, pray regularly for reform in the Catholic and Orthodox churches. It’s easy to neglect such prayers, so long as…
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