Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Not long ago, I heard these statistics about New York City: New York City is in $100 billion in debt. 20% of all NYC residents are on food stamps, which cost $250 million a month. 5% of NYC population are on disability, costing $252 million a month. Other assistance costs…
1. All political power is ambivalent. Vertical violence of “the state” tends to limit horizontal and contested power between people and between tribes. “The State” brings new oppression, but also a measure of new peace and unity. 2. All political formations are ambiguous like this: a strong family conquers weaker…
Gnosticism by any other name would smell the same. But does the church have much of a theological sense of smell, these days, when it comes to the seductions of virtuality in our worshipping communities? Social isolation during a global pandemic makes good public health sense, but whether church should…
It is a remarkable thing, you know, this thing called priority. Just a few weeks ago, religious leaders were boldly asserting in their high-dollar online videos that it was too dangerous to return to worship and that we needed to listen to our political and health leaders. "They are the…
Somewhere in the city of Jerusalem on a rooftop just a few years after the ascension of Jesus and the outpouring of the Spirit on Pentecost. . . ". . . and just when are you guys going to live up to your ‘Sons of Thunder’ reputation? Huh? A lot…
In my book, Solomon Says: Directives for Young Men ( Amazon , Kindle ) I mention that Solomon portrays wisdom as a woman. But I don’t ask (or answer!) why he did so. Solomon uses the figure of Lady Wisdom without apology or explanation: Wisdom cries aloud in the street,…
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Durkheim, on John Milbank's reading ( Theology and Social Theory , 63-4), attempted to socialize Kant. Comte had already argued that Kant anticipated relativism, since he knew that knowledge had to do with “one's environmental setting” and that “this principle made transcendent metaphysics impossible.” Biology and sociology were to make…
In his Bloodtaking and Peacemaking (180-1), his study of Icelandic society, William Ian Miller distinguishes between feuds and “other types of violence like war, duels, or simple revenge killings that involve no one beyond the killer and his victim.” While he recognizes the difficulties of definition, he lays out seven…
Lamech's song in Genesis 4 is today read as a taunt and a warning. “I have killed a man for wounding me,” he tells his wives, and a boy for striking me. If Cain is avenged sevenfold, then Lamech seventy sevenfold” (Genesis 4:23-24). But there is another reading, one involving…
R. Chris Hassel has compiled a dictionary of every religion-related work he could find in Shakespeare's plays and poems. The entries in Shakespeare's Religious Language are usually divided into three parts - a definition, a compilation of Shakespeare's uses of the term, and references to contemporary or near-contemporary writers (Donne…
Ted Grimsrud's Instead of Atonement attempts to tells the “Bible's salvation story” without appeal to the “logic of retribution.” Sacrifice, he says, was not about retribution but about the worshipers grateful response to God's saving acts; it doesn't change God's attitude toward us, and neither does the death of Jesus.…
In The Anti-social Family , recently republished by Verso, Michele Barrett and Mary McIntosh lament that, for all the hubbub about changing gender roles, not all that much has changed: “A gross asymmetry in heterosexual relations remains, despite these improvements. Men still seek and are willing to pay for the…
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