Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Theopolis is delighted to announce that we have hired Brian Moats as Assistant to President Peter Leithart. An Alabama native and graduate of Boyce College in Louisville, Brian is a professional photographer who has also worked as a salesman and dispatcher for Charter Communications and Wayne's Environmental Services. Brian and…
Over the last few years, I have had frequent cause to return to the question of the ways in which the past and its forms of liturgy should be handled within the Church today. Keeping faith with the past is seldom as straightforward an endeavour as it might initially appear,…
The book of Proverbs appears as a largely random collection of aphorisms drawn from experience saturated in law. Despite its random arrangement, however, the book does have an over-arching structure that reinforces its main themes. One way to gather clues regarding the structure of a biblical book (or any book)…
Prior to attending the week-long intensive course on Holistic Mission, my wife and I were living two counties away from Milwaukee, in the comfortably quiet and rural village of Slinger, Wisconsin. In God’s providence, after nearly ten years of living in Slinger, we realized some changes to our comfortable and…
I have many Roman Catholic friends. Leading from my time at Saint Louis University and continuing through various scholarly engagements I often get an opportunity to discuss history and theology with Roman Catholics who are very well educated in their tradition and practice, some of whom are leading scholars in…
Theopolis ended its second year of operation with its Pentecost Term course on Music in Life and Liturgy last week. Co-taught by Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio and scholar-in-residence James Jordan, the Music course was the largest Theopolis course yet. Sixteen pastors, seminary students, and music ministers from nine…
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Students of Ancient Near Eastern religions and cultures have typically assumed that the peoples of the ANE operated, like ancient Israelites, with a dichotomy of holy and profane. Beate Pongratz-Leisten doubts this, both for Mesopotamia and for Israel. The notion that this dichotomy is a universal religious structures goes back…
K. van der Toorn has a 1989 article summarizing the purity system of ancient Mesopotamia. He describes purity rules as a form of temple etiquette. What makes something unclean is not that it is immoral but that it is displeasing in a particular setting, in this case displeasing before the…
Rivka and Moshe Ulmer summarize rabbinic teaching about charitable giving in Righteous Giving to the Poor . The book includes an overview of rabbinic literature in general before it gets to its main topic. Rich in quotation, the section on tzedakah examines the theological underpinnings of charity, the this- and…
Lida V. Nedilsky’s Converts to Civil Society is a sociological study of civil society in contemporary Hong Kong. But the use of the religious term “convert” is not accidental. Nedilsky argues that Christian conversion in Hong Kong opens up possibilities for other forms of voluntary association, both religious and non-religious.…
Ole Bjerg ( Making Money ) doesn’t believe the classic “commodity” accounts of the rise of money, found in both Adam Smith and Marx. Both posit an original barter economy that is made more efficient by the introduction of a commodity that is used as a medium of exchange. Bjerg…
Gerd Theissen’s contribution to The Depth of the Human Person sharply challenges mainstream views of Paul’s anthropology. It’s not that Paul’s theory is holistic rather than dualistic. That assumption is based on a faulty understanding of ancient anthropology. A holistic anthropology doesn’t necessarily imply a positive view of the body,…
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