Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I grew up in the 1950s. This was before the "Sixties" and the democratization, informalization, and general cheapening of the church and her worship. Ministers were Father Donovan, Pastor Eckhart, Reverend MacPherson, Mister (Episcopal) Parker, and Brother Smith. Liturgical speech was high language, sounding kind of like the King James…
Metaphor exerts a surprisingly powerful influence within our thinking. Although it is easily dismissed as little more than a figure of speech, when we attend more closely to the ways in which we use it, metaphor’s importance swiftly becomes more apparent. Although many of our metaphors have become quite invisible…
What is a tree, scientifically speaking? A mere googling gives the following answer: “a woody perennial plant, typically having a single stem or trunk growing to a considerable height and bearing lateral branches at some distance from the ground.” We can increase detail by describing its family, genus, species and…
The majority of Western evangelical Christians rarely, if ever, fast as a form of spiritual discipline. In our culture, fasting is more connected with dieting than worship, the other side of our deeply ambiguous fascination with food. Food is everywhere. We eat more than ever before, at greater speed, and…
A Grammar of Creation An understanding of the visual-musical language of the Bible must begin with Genesis 1. This is fortunate, because when explaining biblical types to academics, as opposed to children, one is repeatedly forced to start from scratch. From birth, a healthy child is attuned to rhythm and…
In an inverse Eden, a land laid waste, one works alone tending the trash. There are none like him in all the earth, inquisitive, playful and most drawn to those mysterious, dancing bipedal creatures who lost earth and left it to go wandering the vast wilderness of space. Humans have…
Showing page 134 of 309
Showing page 39 of 43
Sermon outline for October 5: Toward Jerusalem and the Cross, Luke 9:1-62 INTRODUCTION Luke 9 marks the great turning point in Luke’s account of Jesus’ ministry. Luke 9:1-9 forms the climax of the Galilean ministry, and later in this chapter, Jesus begins His journey toward Jerusalem, where, as He predicts…
Virgil seems nearly to have come to the Augustinian insight that the Roman empire is nothing more than civil war writ large. Aeneas, the pius hero, has to combat furor , which is passion, anger, rage, everything that causes disorder in the world. But during the battle scenes in the…
The multi-faceted David Gelernter offers a rousing call to the Bush administration to defend their Iraqi policy on a moral rather than strategic basis in the October 6 edition of the Weekly Standard . He compares the debate over Iraq today with the debate between Chamberlain and Churchill in the…
In the September 29 issue of the Weekly Standard , Sam Munson reviews Peter Carey’s novel, My Life As a Fake , a fictionalized account of a famous Australian literary hoax. As Munson summarizes the (true) story: Over a single wet weekend on an army base (or so at least…
Exhortation for September 28: We sometimes think of the church as a collection of families, and in some respects that is true. More fundamentally, though, the church is a family. We are brothers and sisters of one another because we are all brothers and sisters of Jesus, whose Father is…
The Twelve apostles are all men of Galilee, but as soon as Acts opens they are based in Jerusalem and remain there, even after the stoning of Stephen and the dispersal of the church. Perhaps there’s a connection with the remnant typology mentioned in an earlier post: The remnant has…
Showing page 2189 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
