Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Along His journey to Jerusalem, Jesus stops frequently to have meals, three times with Pharisees (7:37-50; 11:37-54; 14:1-35). Meals were central to Jesus’ ministry. He comes “eating and drinking” (Luke 7:34). While His meals are not just for refreshment, they are opportunities for teaching the protocols of the kingdom. Meals…
Time as a realm of participation can be difficult for us imaginatively to grasp. While music is a profoundly temporal art, exploring the medium of time like no other, most of our temporal experience seems decidedly unmusical in character, disjointed and unorchestrated. The form in which we naturally discover time…
John devotes much attention to Jesus’ burial clothes. He tells us that Nicodemus brought about a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes to spice Jesus body, and that He was bound in linen wrappings. We find out that His body and His head were wrapped separately. (John 19:39-40; 20:6-7). When…
Thinking about time in terms of music also helps us to appreciate its unity and inner relations. Henri Bergson observes our cultural habit of dividing time into discrete moments, and conceiving of these as if akin to objects in a spatial succession. [1] Against such a notion, Bergson argues for…
As we attend to these and other aspects of music’s temporality, Begbie suggests, we will find means by which to resist some of our habitual modern ways of conceptualizing time, most especially our tendency to conceive of time as if it were a homogeneous set of technologically quantifiable units laid…
The Hidden Dimension In many fields of scientific study, the apparent complications and contradictions are dispelled once the internal logic is perceived. Biblical hermeneutics is no different, since the author of Creation is the Author of the Word. The Bible’s literary labyrinth radiates organically from an algorithm so simple it…
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B ach's Cantata 80 is an elaboration of Luther's “Ein Feste Burg.” The second movement of the Cantata is a duet of soprano and bass, the former singing the second verse of Luther's hymn while the bass sings an embellishment promising the victory of God. The bass part begins and…
A ccording to 2 Chronicles 23:11, the people put a “crown” on the head of seven-year-old Joash, the Davidic scion who represents the restoration of the Davidic kingdom after an interregnum. The noun for “crown” ( nezer ) is an unusual one. As William Johnstone points out ( 1 &…
T he Economist reports on the racial gap in American infant mortality rates: “Black babies born in America are more than twice as likely as white ones to die before their first birthdays.” For some time, “infant mortality has generally declined at a faster rate for blacks than whites, leading…
The TLS “Poem of the Week” was James Fenton's “God, a Poem.” It opens with this complaint to God: A nasty surprise in a sandwich, A drawing-pin caught in your sock, The limpest of shakes from a hand which You’d thought would be firm as a rock, A serious mistake…
I n his contribution to Joy and Human Flourishing , Jurgen Moltmann observes that modern theories of religion trace it to “misfortune.” Marx is representative: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature.” Religion must be useful, must meet a need, “because everything in the modern world must be necessary;…
R obert Solomon argues ( The Joy of Philosophy ) that “Vengeance is the original passion for justice. The word ‘justice' in the Old Testament virtually always refers to revenge.” This isn't isolated or primitive: “throughout most of history the concept of justice has been far more concerned with the…
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