Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Paul contends that with the death of Christ on the Cross, there was an overcoming of the Principalities and the Powers (Col. 2:15). A great deal has been written on this subject over the last 60 years. 1 What was for a long time either ignored, or regarded by liberal…
The Gospel reading for the third Sunday in Lent this year (John 2:13-22) was enclosed by two verses (13 and 23) each of which mentions Jerusalem, the city where God chose to place His Name and habitation, and the Passover, the festival which, above all others, speaks of the Lamb…
The 2018 Theopolis Easter term course on the theology of the sexes was a resounding success. Visiting instructor Dr. Alastair Roberts (PhD, Durham) laid out a rich biblical theology of sexuality, before addressing a variety of philosophical, political, and ethical issues. Roberts stressed that our questions about sex and gender,…
Click HERE for part 1 of this series, and HERE for part 2. The recurring characterization problems with such Strong Female Characters arise in no small measure from the struggle to show that men and women are interchangeable and can compete and cooperate with each other on the same terms.…
The Rise of the Action Heroine Click HERE for part 1 of this series. Partly as a result of this everywoman heroine trend, partly in order to be more inclusive in traditionally male dominated genres, partly in order to push back against stereotypes, partly in order to legitimate eye candy…
I was in prison and you came to me. (Matthew 25:36) From the New York Times: U.S. prison population dwarfs that of other nations The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners. Indeed, the United States…
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Plays might be promoted as a kind of opiate of the masses: Mass entertainment that keeps them from more violent entertainments like rioting and pillaging. This could be problematic, if the entertainments were too heady for most people to follow. Thomas Heywood (1612) suggested that playwrights should “ayme . .…
How regulated was Shakespeare’s own theater? And for what reasons? Patterson highlights various reasons for closing or permitting theaters: audience composition, including the fear that a large collection of workers might be distruptive; public health; economic concerns; religious and moral concerns, especially Sabbatarian; and “a shifting and elusive imperative to…
Shakespeare’s fortunes in the US were, understandably, different from in England. Initially, Shakespeare was America’s most popular playwright, appealing to a wide sector of the American populace. Patterson notes that “by the end of the nineteenth century ‘Shakespeare’ had become a cultural icon, the property only of the ‘legitimate theater,’…
Annabel Patterson notes ( Shakespeare and the Popular Voice ) that contemporary critics, whatever their own political outlook, assume that Shakespeare was an advocate of Elizabethan hierarchy. This view, however, is a product of the 19th century. Dryden, Johnson, and others criticize Shakespeare for violating the conventions of his genre,…
By the 18th century, acting styles also invested Shakespeare with “courtly” virtues of control, dignity, stateliness. Dobson writes, “Shakespearian acting . . . in the decades following Betterton’s death in 1710, seems to have settled into a grandiloquent vein of static declamation, best exemplified by the stout James Quin (1693-1766)…
Dobson again: “after Charles II’s death in 1685 England would never again have another monarch with such an informed interest in the drama (or, mercifully, such a lascivious one), and deprived of royal patronage and protection the playhouses came under renewed attack from the moralists (led by the redoubtable clergyman…
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