Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
"The faithful use of sacraments, and indeed a fully sacramental view of creation, is vital to the life of the Church. Baptism and the Lord's Supper are rites that directly shape the community and the Body, because they were given by God for that express purpose. A deficient practice of…
Weightlessness is fun. At the beginning of Gravity (2013) , we can see one astronaut dancing the Macarena and another one playing with his jetpack. They like it out there in the space. Apart from zero-gravity they can enjoy beautiful views, and even the silence is likable, although Matt Kowalski…
I recently went to a lunch that is more or less quarterly. About a dozen of us go. It is a lunch held in honor of a retired professor of religion and philosophy. I have been one of his acquaintances for more than 40 years. In his tenure as professor,…
Why Theopolis? Don't we already have seminaries and Bible colleges and other institutions for theological education? Why do we need another one? I get this question now and again. I ask myself this question even more often. What follows is a partial answer. Back in the 1990s, seminaries seemed to…
I think the logic of the Lutheran Reformation can be summarized in one sentence, attributed to Luther himself: "God does not need your good works, but your neighbor does." The first half of that statement is justification by faith . God doesn't need our works to satisfy his justice or…
If you are looking to start a fight with Christians, there is hardly a better subject to do so than the arts. Music, movies, paintings, and literature have provided no small battlegrounds for Christians to war. We are emotionally invested in the arts. A song, a book, or a film…
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How can we live together when we disagree in the midst of our deepest differences? asked Os Guinness in his 2008 The Case for Civility . In a month that has seen violent clashes across the US, his question is more relevant now than when he wrote the book. The…
"What is a place ?" asks Massimo Cacciari in his contribution to The Intelligence of Place . To answer, he turns to Aristotle, who claimed that "all suppose that things which exist are somewhere." Fair enough, but what does that mean? Aristotle has some difficulty: "Entities are characterized by their…
The Paris Review published an excerpt from Jeff Nagy's forthcoming book on Degas and His Model . Written by one Alice Michel, and purportedly based on a first-person account from one of the painter's models, named Pauline, the account was first published in 1919 in Mercure de France. Nagy thinks…
David Nelson and Chad Raith (both friends of mine) offer a concise, lucid guide for those perplexed by Ecumenism . After an opening chapter defining ecumenism, the book traces the history of the ecumenical movement from its origins in the early twentieth century through the epochal shifts of the 1960s…
A report published in Social Forces examines the ripple effects of divorce. Instead of individualistically tracking the effects of divorce on the divorced couple, examining the costs and benefits of divorce, or, at most on the rest of the family, the study summarizes a social network analysis of divorce: What…
In discussing the rise of "mysteriological liturgical piety" in the fourth century, Alexander Schmemann ( Introduction to Liturgical Theology ) emphasizes the increasing pomp and ceremony of the liturgy. Orthodox liturgist though he is, Schmemann doesn't approve the development, as it emphasizes "exterior" rather than "interior" solemnity. "Exterior solemnity," he…
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