Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The drink offering or libation ( nesek ) is mentioned in only three places in the book of Leviticus. When the sheaf of the firstfruits was waved before the Lord, a grain offering was to be burned, along with "its libation, a fourth of a hin of wine [approx. one…
When I became a Calvinist it wasn't long before I learned that John Owen’s The Death of Death in the Death of Christ was regarded as the masterful treatise on what is known as "Limited Atonement"--the "L" in the TULIP mnemonic device for "the five points of Calvinism." This wasn't…
One of the advantages of paying very close attention to the details in the Bible, especially chronological and genealogical details, is that they can shed light on situations that don’t seem to make much sense apart from them. One such situation is that of Bathsheba. It appears that Bathsheba willingly…
The Feast of Ingathering in the seventh month of the Sinaitic calendar is also called the Feast of Sukkoth, of Booths, also called Feast of Tabernacles. I have usually called it by that last phrase, and it is the most common today; but there is a problem: A tabernacle is…
When Matthew’s Gospel was first read aloud to the fledgling Christian congregations, the experience must have been like seeing the words “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” appear afresh on cinema screens in 1999. Yet, unlike The Phantom Menace, the New Testament did not disappoint. Why?…
Fragmentation and integration are phenomena which artist Makoto Fujimura feels bodily, and about which he is concerned profoundly. What do these mean for him? How may we draw his insights into this ongoing consideration—itself integrative—of integration in a fragmented world? Thus far I have been acquainting you with matters already…
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Conservatives often point to the 60s as the hinge point in the history of sexual morality. They mean the 1960s. As Faramerz Dabhoiwala shows in his Origins of Sex , the sexual revolution has much deeper roots, in the 1660s and 1760s as much as in the 1960s. Dabhoiwala places…
Christians and traditionalists often condemn homosexual activity as “unnatural” behavior. The apostle Paul uses precisely this term. What does it mean? If it is taken to mean that there is no homosexual behavior in the natural world, then the claim is manifestly untrue. As James Neill points out in The…
“Music,” writes Roger Scruton ( Soul of the World , 175) “addresses us from beyond the borders of the natural world” and thus “requires us to respond to a subjectivity that lies beyond the world of objects, in a space of its own.” It’s one of the intimations of a…
At the heart of Scruton’s Soul of the World is a plea for a “cognitive dualism” that he sets in opposition to all “nothing but” reductionisms - music is nothing but sounds, painting nothing but pigments on canvas, the world nothing but matter in motion, humans thought nothing but neurons…
The sacred is Janus-faced, writes Roger Scruton in Soul of the World (15): “Sacred objects, words, animals, ceremonies, places all seem to stand at the horizon of our world, looking out to that which is not of this world, because it belongs in the sphere of the divine, and looking…
Keith Darden writes in Foreign Affairs that the main problem in Ukraine is not Russia but Ukraine. It’s dangerous to ignore the fact that Russia is exploiting divisions that have existed in Ukraine for a long time: “inattention to Ukraine’s internal demons reflects a dangerous misreading of current events; the…
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