Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In the Bible, all the world is a stage, but like the Tabernacle, that stage moves around a lot. David’s defeat of Goliath can only be fully understood as liturgy fulfilled in history. Liturgy, as a sacrifice of praise, is the step-by-step process of resolving a conflict. It relinquishes all…
Aristotle isn’t fundamentally wrong about friendship, nor is the long tradition that follows him. But you might not gather that by reading some of the more pointed critics of the classical conception of friendship. I think, however, that the classical view is not only viable but taken up and fulfilled…
#13 in Theopolis Papers, Seeking Integration in a Fragmented World It is time for me to “cast off” integration, the way a knitter removes a completed scarf from the needles. I want to bring my quest concerning integration to a decent closure, though my happy quest for reality continues. With…
Below are some notes on a particular sub-theme of Daniel 3, namely the downfall of Babylon’s liturgy. First up, a few words on our text’s literary construction. One of the most conspicuous features of Dan. 3 is its author’s love of lists . Personnel are listed (vs. 2, 3, 27),…
Few things in Scripture, few things in the Christian life, are more familiar than the Lord’s Prayer. Sunday after Sunday, we pray these words together with our brothers and sisters. At home, alone or with our families, we pray this prayer daily, as Jesus taught us (Luke 11:2: “When you…
At the 2019 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America, the denominational delegates considered a number of official overtures (requests for action from the regional parts of the denomination) relating to issues of gender and sexuality. The PCA is conservative. As evidence of this, the assembly passed a resolution…
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A fter sharing a breakfast of fish at the shore of Tiberius with his disciples, Jesus speaks directly to Peter (John 21). Peter had denied Jesus three times; now Jesus confirms his love three times. Peter denied Jesus at a charcoal fire in the high priest's court; now he's restored…
I n the closing chapter of Heaven on Earth , Richard Landes considers the import of the two major apocalyptic threats of the early twenty-first century—anthropogenic global warming (AGW) and global jihad warming (GJW). Both seem to portend TEOTWAWKI, the end of the world as we know it. What we…
I n his study of The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature , Keith Booker observes that “much of the history of recent utopian thought can be read as a gradual shift from utopian to dystopian emphases, while utopian thought itself has come more and more to be seen as escapist…
W e are apt to think of a deeply religious person as a ‘true believer,' writes Howard Wettstein in The Significance of Religious Experience . In the Hebrew Bible, though, “there is no expression . . . that corresponds to our term, ‘believer.' The phrase that comes closest is ‘…
R ichard Landes's Heaven on Earth is a study of millennial apocalyptic movements, that is, movements that share a belief in “ a millennial vision of the world transformed, and an apocalyptic belief in that transformation’s imminence ” (22). Though the movement he explores share a belief in the transformation…
According to Richard Landes ( Heaven on Earth ), traditional societies are organized by a “prime divider,” a boundary between elites and commoners. He follows Ernest Gellner in called these “agro-literate” societies, since that phrase names two key technologies that mark the division. More generally, “Elites construct prime dividers along…
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