Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Summary In what follows, I will consider the “year-stamps” employed in Scripture, i.e., statements of the form, “Such-and-such an event took place in the Xth year of Y.” In the process, I will suggest some ways in which the Biblical narrative might relate to events in the extra-Biblical world, though…
In the first essay on the parable of the Prodigal Son, I suggested that the problems commentators and others encounter in interpreting Jesus three-part parable are not accidental. These are not just problems in our ignorance of cultural background. They are intentional features of the stories —stories designed to poke…
The story of the Prodigal Son is perhaps the most well-known story in the Bible. As others have observed, it may also be one of the most misunderstood. In two short essays, I will point out features of this story that are commonly neglected, aspects of Jesus’ parable that might…
The parable of Lazarus and the nameless rich man is not an independent story. It is part of a long context that begins in Luke 15:1, where Jesus is eating with tax collectors and sinners and the scribes and Pharisees grumble. In response to their hardheartedness, Jesus tells a three-part…
The Bible is written so that even when a reader cannot pick up on what might be deeper or more detailed aspects of a text, there is virtually always a message to be heard. In the ancient world, where the “reader” of Scripture would likely be a church official facing…
The distinction between garden (or vineyard) and field begins in Genesis 2. This relates to the ordering of the formless world. Plants of the field are contrasted with the garden planted by God in Genesis 2:5&8. Later on, under the Old Covenant the Israelites will be required to keep their…
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A fine statement from Iris Murdoch on the capacity of literature to seek and reveal truth: "I think that though they are so different, philosophy and literature are both truth-seeking and truth-revealing activities. They are cognitive activities, explanations. Literature, like other arts, involves exploration, classification, discrimination, organized vision. Of course…
Gavin Hyman ( A Short History of Atheism ) doesn't think contemporary atheists are aware of the origins and cultural conditions of their own unfaith. They suffer from "a lack of awareness of atheism’s own origins, of the historical, philosophical and cultural matrix out of which it emerged, of its…
In Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece , Rosalind Thomas surveys the current state of Homeric studies. In the background is the Millman-Lord thesis that the epics are the product of oral improvisation. Thomas discerns two schools: “On the one hand, the formulaic theory of Parry and Lord is being…
Thomas Schirrmacher ( God Want You to Learn, Labor, and Love ) outlines a Trinitarian conception of labor. Work, like all human activity, has its uncreated origin in God. We are able to work because we are made in the image of a God of labor: "In the Bible, man’s…
Robert Jenson addresses this perennial question ( Systematic Theology , 1.228-9) in a characteristically Jensonian fashion, by reminding us of the dynamics of discourse: "In all true mutual discourse . . . each must be both subject for and object of the other. As I am present to address you,…
The following was first published in 2011 at Firstthings.com . “By the twelfth century,” Christopher Page writes in his magisterial The Christian West and Its Singers (2010), “the Latin West could be imagined as a soundscape of Latin chant.” From the eighth-century alliance of Pope Stephen with the Frankish King…
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