Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Your first born is a novelty. Everything seems special and unique. No one’s child is like yours. Then, over time, you begin to make mistakes. Some strategies don’t work on the additional personalities born into your family, or they simply don’t scale from a practical perspective. With maturity, you realize…
Could Jesus have sinned? Before answering the question, it's best to run through a couple of qualifiers. First, scripture clearly teaches He did not sin. Second, I realize the seeming futility when discussing hypothetical situations. The question of the peccability of Jesus, or Jesus's capacity to sin, is in reality,…
The first time I saw the inside of a prison was in 1999; I was 16. I hadn’t knocked over a fruit stand or been caught stealing hubcaps, I was just an unsuspecting teenager playing piano for a Louisiana gospel group. One Wednesday evening in October, my pastor and leader…
The act of naming carries a lot of weight in the Bible. Naming denotes authority and possession; the namer signifying that he understands the thing named, and therefore possesses the requisite wisdom to rule over it. God set the stage for naming when he named the domains during the first…
This short essay makes an obvious point: Church growth is a matter of the rate of entry into a church relative to the rate of exit from that church. Perhaps church growth literature has long recognized that fact. Yet given the greater focus in church – at least in my…
If you’ve not yet heard of Aaron Renn’s three worlds framework , here’s the quick version: once upon a time, being a Christian was a net social good in American society. Whatever was going on behind the scenes in elite institutions, the general rank-and-file perception of Christianity was positive. That…
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C atherine Pickstock claims that the rejection of liturgy is central to modernity. Having refused the integrations of liturgy, modernity forges various forms of pseudo-liturgy, pale substitutes to accomplish what the liturgy once did in Western society. One of these pseudo-liturgies is civility: “Once the common ritual basis in which…
D avid Goldman compares “transgressors” Milo Yiannopoulos and Yuja Wang . Milo's transgressiveness is his essence; Wang, a thirty-year-old Chinese pianist, plays the Western repertoire, her transgressiveness evident in her habit of performing in micro-dresses and revealing evening gowns. (Goldman wrote this just before Milo's public humiliation.) Despite her Asian…
P ete Spiliakos makes the counter-intuitive point that Trump's nationalism will fail politically unless it can become more nationalist: Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again' slogan is, paradoxically, insufficiently nationalist. MAGA leaves out African Americans for whom America was not noticeably greater in the past—when, for instance, blacks were prevented from…
1 Chronicles 27:25–31 lists the officials in charge of David's stores and lands. Twelve men are named and each has an area of responsibility: 1. Azmaveth, king's treasuries, v. 25a 2. Jonathan, treasuries in the field, v. 25b 3. Ezri, supervisor of field workers, v. 26 4. Sheim, vineyards, v.…
I n an article on “Liturgy, Art and Politics,” Catherine Pickstock argues that the liturgy holds together universal and particular in a unique way. It does this in part because it “extends the liturgical tension between the ideal and the real to an extreme, and yet still holds the polarities…
I n her meticulous and revealing study of The Eucharist in the Reformation , Lee Palmer Wandel argues that Luther and Zwingli divided at Marburg because their respective positions were incommensurate, incomprehensible each to the other. Specifically, they “divided over the nature of Christ's body,” but that point of division…
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