Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Your first born is a novelty. Everything seems special and unique. No one’s child is like yours. Then, over time, you begin to make mistakes. Some strategies don’t work on the additional personalities born into your family, or they simply don’t scale from a practical perspective. With maturity, you realize…
Could Jesus have sinned? Before answering the question, it's best to run through a couple of qualifiers. First, scripture clearly teaches He did not sin. Second, I realize the seeming futility when discussing hypothetical situations. The question of the peccability of Jesus, or Jesus's capacity to sin, is in reality,…
The first time I saw the inside of a prison was in 1999; I was 16. I hadn’t knocked over a fruit stand or been caught stealing hubcaps, I was just an unsuspecting teenager playing piano for a Louisiana gospel group. One Wednesday evening in October, my pastor and leader…
The act of naming carries a lot of weight in the Bible. Naming denotes authority and possession; the namer signifying that he understands the thing named, and therefore possesses the requisite wisdom to rule over it. God set the stage for naming when he named the domains during the first…
This short essay makes an obvious point: Church growth is a matter of the rate of entry into a church relative to the rate of exit from that church. Perhaps church growth literature has long recognized that fact. Yet given the greater focus in church – at least in my…
If you’ve not yet heard of Aaron Renn’s three worlds framework , here’s the quick version: once upon a time, being a Christian was a net social good in American society. Whatever was going on behind the scenes in elite institutions, the general rank-and-file perception of Christianity was positive. That…
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Baudrillard sounds like a nut when he says that we are now living in a hyperreal world, a virtual world. But there is certainly something to it. We’re still physical creatures, of course, surrounded by physical objects, and that doesn’t change when we get strapped in for some virtual experience.…
Postmodernity unleashes fear, Bauman says: “Modernity was a continuous and uncompromising effort to fill or to cover up the void; the modern mentality held a stern belief that the job can be done - if not today then tomorrow. The sin of postmodernity is to abandon the effort and to…
Johannes Fabian argues in his Time and the Other that “geopolitics has its ideological foundations in chronopolitics.” Bauman summarizes the argument: “The modern perspective ‘denied coevality’ to any form of life different from its own; it construed the Other of itself as ‘living in another time.’ The allochronic distancing device…
In his recent history of slavery in the New World, David Brion Davis records some surprising facts about American slavery. Prior to 1820, for instance, African slaves were more numerous than European settlers by a ratio of 5 to 1. About 5-6 percent of slaves in the Western hemisphere were…
In his history of the idea of toleration, the late A.J. Conyers summarizes the arguments of Robert P. Kraynak on the development of Locke’s thought on religious toleration. The puzzle is this: Locke’s early works are absolutist in a Hobbesian vein, invoking the supreme magistrate’s power to oversee religion for…
Zbigniew Herbert writes in a poem entitled “Mr Cogito and Pop” of a visit to a concert. “Mr Cogito,” a recurring character in Herbert’s poems, reflects on the “aesthetics of noise” and offers some penetrating observations on the character of contemporary pop music: “to be a god means to hurl…
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