Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Paul writes to Jews, “You who abhor idols, do you rob temples?” (Romans 2:22b) The English translation “rob temples” makes readers think of pagan temples. There was only one Temple for Israel, so robbing more than one would indicate other temples are in view. And if the Jews wanted to…
Two offerings Humanity’s first vocation involves guarding and serving the trees that emerge from the ground (Genesis 2:15). God provides these trees to humanity for food. A serpent appears and tempts the couple to eat from a special forbidden tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Humanity…
At the outset of the Torah (as Christians understand it), a triune God creates the heavens and earth over the course of a seven-day week. Why? What’s the connection between the three and the seven? Could a triune God have created the world over any period of time he chose?…
How relevant to the modern reader are the flying axe head of Deuteronomy 19:5 and the roof parapet of Deuteronomy 22:8? Indeed, how relevant were they to the daily lives of Israelites thirty-five hundred years ago? Suppose that accidental falls from rooftops were exceedingly uncommon in ancient Israel, or that…
1 For most of my life, the standing of the American church as a source of national social and political order was measured by reports from the front of the so-called “culture wars.” 2 Memory brings to mind battles over feminism and the ERA, so-called gay rights, the breakdown of…
But when Herod died, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt, saying, ‘Rise, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel…’ And he went and lived in a city called Nazareth, so that what was spoken by the…
Showing page 17 of 309
Showing page 39 of 43
Ancient politics had to do with governing a people set in a particular location; so did the modern politics of the nation-state. With the large-scale population movements of the last half-century, the ethnic homogeneity of the nation-state (never entirely homogenous to begin with) has dissolved further. Nationality is no longer…
Political scientist David Jacobson notes the connection between immigration and shifts in understandings of rights: “Transnational migration is steadily eroding the traditional basis of nation-state membership, namely citizenship. As rights have come to be predicated on residency, not citizen state, the distiction between ‘citizen’ and ‘alian’ has eroded. The devaluation…
The reviewer of Ernest Sterberg’s 1999 Economy of Icons in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology summarizes some main points from this latter-day Thorstein Veblen: “The thesis of this controversial book is that ‘enterprises make their way in the capitalist economy by transforming commodities into icons.’ An icon is…
Discussions of the postmodern self often trace a genealogy from Descartes to Locke to Kant to Nietzsche to Heidegger to Foucault. But though philosophers no doubt have some influence on the daily experiences of normal humans, this sort of treatment doesn’t quite get to the ground level. In 1991, Paul…
Evidence that Fukuyama may have had it right: Walter Truett Anderson writes that “the International Commission on Peace and Food (in its 1994 report) pointed to the urgent need to create employment for hundreds of millions of poor people, and at the same time dismissed the notion that most of…
Psychologist Brewster Smith decries the solvents of postmodern life - cynicism, shallowness, sensationalism, warfare between fundamentalisms and relativisms, uncertainty about all standards, the “fin de siecle sense of drift and doom” (even after the fin). What’s his solution? Find yourself a community that can give you values, standards, a heritage,…
Showing page 1768 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
