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…
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“R emember His wonders which He does,” the Levites sing when the ark is brought to Jerusalem (1 Chronicles 16:12a), doubtless referring preeminently to the wonders of the exodus but more distantly to the wonder of doing/making creation. At creation and in the exodus, God's wonders are the wonders of…
T oward the end of the rambunctious Paris Review interview , sometimes a meta-interview about the process of interviewing, Mark Helprin answers the question, Why do you write? As always, he answers circuitously, by contrasting creativity in pre- and modern art: . . . in a secular world, each artist…
I n a NYRB review of Anthony Gottlieb’s Dream of Enlightenment , Thomas Nagel corrects Gottlieb’s account of Hobbes’s moral philosophy. He lucidly summarizes Hobbes’s moral argument for absolutism: Hobbes’s theory, and what led to his being attacked as a moral nihilist, was his refusal to appeal to any concern…
I n his poignant, deeply personal New York essay on his distraction addiction, Andrew Sullivan reflects on the silence of sacred places: “From the moment I entered a church in my childhood, I understood that this place was different because it was so quiet. The Mass itself was full of…
M axwell Anderson’s forthcoming Antiquities surveys the world of antiquities, summarizing law, history of collection, the difference between the interests of archeologists and antiquities dealers, forgeries and their detection, the market in antiquities. Everything you’d want to know. Anderson places the rise of interest in antiquities in the context of…
S tuart Banner attempts to draw the fine line between investment and gambling in his forthcoming Speculation . Among other things, his book is a history of America’s double-mindedness about speculative investing. Visitors to the early US regularly made comments like this from German journalist Francis Grund: “An American merchant…
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