Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
G.K. Chesterton assumes a surprising and memorable perspective from which to view the events of Palm Sunday (Matthew 21:1-11) The Donkey by: G.K. Chesterton When fishes flew and forests walked And figs grew upon thorn, Some moment when the moon was blood Then surely I was born. With monstrous head…
There is a common biblical principle: you must give back what you steal. In the Bible, restitution is repayment with interest. If you rob someone of their money, you have to pay back double what you stole. A thief must pay back fourfold if he steals a sheep, and if…
Identifying Isaiah’s suffering servant with the promised Messiah is unthinkable for a Jew because it combines the offices of humble priest and victorious king. While it is frustrating that Jews refuse to see the sufferings of Christ in Isaiah 53, the reluctance of Christians to interpret the passage in its…
Let everything that has breath praise the Lord! Praise the Lord! Psalm 150:6 (ESV) The command to praise God is pervasive throughout Scripture. In the verse above the Spirit calls all things with breath to praise the Lord. Song is also clearly featured all throughout Scripture and is a featured…
“Gender is a social construct.” That’s shocking to people who have assumed that gender and sex were synonyms but at least since I was in college, in the ‘80s, we were taught that “gender” refers to the forms, the customs, the traditions that our culture teaches us to define what…
In Genesis 49, Jacob prophesies about (blesses and curses?) his twelve sons. The first three of them don’t fare well. Jacob recalls Reuben’s offense of taking his concubine (Genesis 35:22) and the murderous violence of Simeon’s and Levi against the Canaanite inhabitants of the city of Shechem (Genesis 34). He…
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Leviticus is the oilest book of the Bible. The Hebrew shemen is used 42 times (6 x 7); the closest competitor is Numbers, with 34 uses. The uses of shemen are clustered. Leviticus 2 uses the word 9 times, all with reference to the preparation of the tribute offering (…
Why do so many Egyptian statues have broken noses? Julia Wolkoff summarizes the answer of Brooklyn Museum curator Edward Bleiberg. Noses protrude, and so are more apt to be knocked off accidentally, but the pattern is too consistent to be accident. Erosion could account for some, but not all. Bleiberg…
Some snippets from Philip Turner's Christian Ethics and the Church . The premise of Turner's book is well summarized by a passage he quotes from Sabina Lovibond's Ethical Formation : "The ethical, let us say, pertains to what people learn to value through immersion in a community acquainted with ideas…
Levitical offerings send a "soothing aroma" ( reyach nichoach ) to Yahweh. Israel needs to produce good smells because her sin is noxious to Yahweh. When Israel rebels, His "nose burns." By slaughtering a substitute animal and turing it to smoke, Israel soothes Yahweh's hot nose. But that can't be…
“Spiritual reading” is usually associated with patristic, monastic, and medieval modes of reading. It's fruitful, however, to shift the focus and ask what the Spirit has to do with our reading. The Spirit is the enlivening breath of God, the water of God who makes us into a fruitful garden.…
Liberalism is "in origin primarily a refusal of ecclesial power." So write John Milbank and Adrian Pabst ( Politics of Virtue , 31). In refusing ecclesial power, early modern political theorists renounced the arrangement of Latin Christendom. The "first polity knowing no bounds and truly based upon the rule of…
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