Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
There’s something about joy that is infectious. And occasionally, we all have the opportunity to be in someone’s presence who is so happily engaged in their work, so joyous in their pursuits, that we want to learn from them. We want to know where that joy comes from and attain…
Jesus has told us that He intends all nations to be discipled. Nations. Not just individuals. All nations as theocracies. That being the case, the Church exists for the life of the world. Being baptized is not only a matter of becoming part of a new family, it is also…
Harold Bloom’s essay on Macbeth includes the kind of penetrating insights that make Bloom the great Shakespearean scholar that he is, but it also includes his typical and intense anti-Christian bias. “If Lear was pre-Christian, then Macbeth is weirdly post-Christian. There are, as we have seen, Christian intimations that haunt…
Revelation 16 is a day of atonement text. The tabernacle of the testimony has been opened (15:5). The angels who receive the bowls are clothed in linen (15:6), the clothing of the high priest when he goes into the sanctuary on the day of atonement (Leviticus 16:4). The temple is…
From time to time, when I’ve lectured on how to read the Bible, I’ve used art-music as one example thereof. When we listen to a simple folk song, we hear the same melody over and over again, but this is not how composers write "high" music. Let me amplify. A…
"For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea-monster, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth" (Matthew 12:40). Some reflections on Jonah’s Big Fish have led to the following essay. Let me…
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Oliver and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan pithily sum up Tertullian’s argument in De corona militis ( From Irenaeus to Grotius , 24): “By concentrating on the particular issue of whether a Christian should wear the military chaplet on ceremonial occasions, it manages to take for granted the more fundamental case against…
Command, Clement of Alexandria wrote, involved “caution, risk taking, and the union of the two,” and these expressed themselves in words, deeds, or word-deeds. Moses was the great model of command, not only to Israel but to the Greeks ( Stromateis , 1.24). Moses’ night march through the sea guided…
In his wise contribution to the Blackwell Companion to Political Theology , RR Reno concludes that Hauerwas’s theology is “a thoroughgoing Christian liberalism” (314). This isn’t a criticism or a charge of inconsistency. Reno knows that Hauerwas “he rejects the liberal ideal of critical detachment. We can never begin by…
Noah Kristula-Green responds to the politicization of the Lego Movie by, well, trying to score political points: “the film does play lip service to political tropes, but what really makes the film work is that it represents the highest form of capitalist expression: it is a commercial.” The film resists…
Putin is watching Ukraine carefully, writes Julia Ioffe , because he knows that what happens in Kiev could be replicated in Moscow: “Putin and the system he built do sweat the small things because Putin sees dissent as a slippery slope. He knows the cold has never stopped a single…
Jesus promises to make the victors in Philadelphia pillars in His temple, and to inscribe a triple name on them. Fill in the blank: “The name of My God, and the name of the ____________ of My God, which comes down out of heaven from My God, and My new…
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