Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
If 1 Chronicles were a movie, it would begin with two hours and forty-five minutes of credits: Name after name scrolling across the screen, most of them (as far as we’re concerned) obscurities and nonentities and unknowns, forgotten fathers and sons and mighty men; all the bit players in the…
Let me locate myself. I’m sitting on a sand dune, three hundred feet above the blue-as-a-swimmer-crab water of Lake Michigan. I’m so high above the surface that the sound of the waves flopping onto the beach is as quiet as wind easing through a screen door. Around me are several…
My title is too grand. What I offer here falls far short of a full description of poetry. I barely offer a definition. A more accurate title would be “Axioms and Suspicions About Poetry.” Axioms first. I have three of them. The first is the closest I can come to…
In his book In Defense of Food Michael Pollan does just what the title suggests, he defends food. Pollan argues that the presupposition behind modern food science, or “nutritionism” as he calls it, is that humans don’t need food, they need nutrients. To be sure, modern science is not yet…
The early church took possession of the Roman Empire within a few centuries, largely because she ministered sacrificially in word and deed. The church provided services and care that the empire and pagan religions could not in times of crisis. The faithful witness of those serving Christians bore great fruit…
My title, “The Original Murder” will be understood by many readers, if not almost all, to refer to Cain’s murder of Abel, but I have in mind the very first murder, the one which Jesus pointed to when He said that Satan was a murderer “from the beginning.” “You are…
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Philip Roth famously announced last year that he was quitting. Writing in the TLS , Adan Thirlwell suggests that what he’s actually doing is continuing his career in an inverted fashion. Thirlwell cites a 1984 interview with Hermione Lee, where Roth described his working method: “Making fake biography, false history,…
In an essay on Dostoevsky and evil in Between Religion and Rationality , Joseph Frank observes that Dostoevsky frequently leads readers into moral horrors, but his “unflinching explorations of evil” don’t leave readers paralyzed. How does that work? Frank traces Dostoevsky’s depiction of evil to his prison experience, recounted in…
In one of his late essays in Speech Genres , Bakhtin traces the secularization of literature to the solvent effects of irony: “Irony has penetrated all languages of modern times (especially French); it has penetrated into all words and forms . . . Irony is everywhere - from the minimal…
In a 1988 article in the Journal of Literature and Theology (2:1), Milbank sketches the contours of a “theology without substance.” Along the way, he offers a critique of Augustine’s signum-res distinction and the implied metaphysics. On the one hand, Augustine pours some of the foundations for a Christian linguistics…
Ronald Osborn’s Death Before the Fall is two books in one, as the subtitle suggests: “Biblical Literalism and the Problem of Animal Suffering.” Part of the book is a critique of “literalism,” especially as expressed in young-earth creationism, the other part is an exegetical defense of the notion that animal…
Jesus threatens to throw the self-appointed prophetess Jezebel onto a bed (Revelation 3:22). The threat carries multiple resonances. The original Jezebel died by being thrown from a window to the ground in front of conquering Jehu. Jesus is the new Jehu throwing Jezebel to her deathbed. It’s fitting that she’s…
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