Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
There’s something about joy that is infectious. And occasionally, we all have the opportunity to be in someone’s presence who is so happily engaged in their work, so joyous in their pursuits, that we want to learn from them. We want to know where that joy comes from and attain…
Jesus has told us that He intends all nations to be discipled. Nations. Not just individuals. All nations as theocracies. That being the case, the Church exists for the life of the world. Being baptized is not only a matter of becoming part of a new family, it is also…
Harold Bloom’s essay on Macbeth includes the kind of penetrating insights that make Bloom the great Shakespearean scholar that he is, but it also includes his typical and intense anti-Christian bias. “If Lear was pre-Christian, then Macbeth is weirdly post-Christian. There are, as we have seen, Christian intimations that haunt…
Revelation 16 is a day of atonement text. The tabernacle of the testimony has been opened (15:5). The angels who receive the bowls are clothed in linen (15:6), the clothing of the high priest when he goes into the sanctuary on the day of atonement (Leviticus 16:4). The temple is…
From time to time, when I’ve lectured on how to read the Bible, I’ve used art-music as one example thereof. When we listen to a simple folk song, we hear the same melody over and over again, but this is not how composers write "high" music. Let me amplify. A…
"For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea-monster, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth" (Matthew 12:40). Some reflections on Jonah’s Big Fish have led to the following essay. Let me…
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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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