Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In Infantilised: How Our Culture Killed Adulthood (2024), Keith Hayward says that we live in a “therapy culture.” This is “a way of thinking” about upbringing and education “when the values and language of counseling and psychotherapy break out from the clinical setting and take hold within the cultural imagination…
In Genesis 20:13, Abraham reveals that when he and his wife left their father’s house, he asked Sarah to call him her brother, not her husband. Abraham looked ahead to the land before them, a land full of violence, and he didn’t trust men there. He believed they would see…
Introduction I am sitting in a rural village in the northern part of a West African country. I’m in the courtyard of an imam. Two other Christians are with me. It’s hot and dusty, but we have come to read Scripture and talk together. As a local Christian takes the…
This is the wey to al good aventure; Be glad, thou reder, and thy sorwe of-caste -Geoffrey Chaucer, The Parlement of Foulys, 131–132 In January I had the honor and delight of speaking at the Church of the Redeemer’s 2025 Christendom Lectures. What follows are drawn from the notes for…
I had often heard that wisdom is visible in the countenance and I thought that I had seen examples of it in the past. But the man who stood before me, loosely holding the reins of the mare and peering around him with sharp interest, gave no outward hint of…
And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light — 1 Corinthians 11:14 In Revelation 5:2, the first of three “Mighty Angels” appears before the throne of God and preaches in a great voice, asking, “Who is worthy to open the book, and to loose the…
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Several of my recent posts were taken from essays in Franco Moretti’s recent collection, The Novel (Princeton). The two-volume English translation abridges the six volumes of the Italian original. The essays are so suggestive that one is tempted to take some time off to learn Italian.
During the sixteenth century, a little before the novel took shape in Western Europe, a very similar form of prose fiction was being developed in China. According to Andrew Plaks, “The significant areas of convergence between what we customarily call the classical novel in China and its namesake in Europe…
Greek novels appear in the late Hellenistic period. One scholar suggests the “typical” Greek novel followed something like the following story-line: “These are novels of travel, adventure, and romantic love, taking place in a vaguely realistic Mediterranean or Near Eastern setting. A boy and a girl, both exceptionally attractive and…
Goody asks why it took so long for the novel form to develop in Europe. If it’s simply a matter of a shift from oral to written, or the technology of printing, that was all in place centuries before the novel took recognizable form. He argues that the main obstacle…
Goody asks why it took so long for the novel form to develop in Europe. If it’s simply a matter of a shift from oral to written, or the technology of printing, that was all in place centuries before the novel took recognizable form. He argues that the main obstacle…
Epic poetry is often seen as characteristic of orally based cultures, but Jack Goody argues that epic more normally appears at the beginning of literate cultures rather than in purely oral cultures. Referring to the research of Parry and Lord on Yugoslav oral poets, he comments “Yugoslavia was by no…
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