Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Jonah is Paul’s typological opposite. Indeed, in the whole Old Testament, it would be difficult to find a more perfect foil to Paul than Jonah. Whereas Paul crosses the sea to enact God’s saving purposes for the Gentiles, Jonah crosses the sea to avoid bringing Gentiles God’s mercy. For that…
Years ago, I realized that if my children wanted to feel like their house was a home, I needed to be intentional about making our physical shelter a place of spiritual refuge. I began to see the Holy Spirit as the indwelling person of the Trinity—the one who makes His…
When the crowds encircle Christ in Solomon’s Porch during the Festival of Dedication, they charge him: “tell us boldly who you are!” 1 They do not draw-up to him to with excited anticipation as they did earlier in the Gospel, 2 instead they flank him like a gang of wolves.…
1 In Deuteronomy 7:1-5, Moses wrote: When Yahweh your God brings you into the land which you go to possess, and has cast out many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations…
Every Advent witnesses the gruesome reanimation of the voice that whispers “you know , Christmas is just a pagan holiday…” with that sort of conversational ellipsis that does not so much invite further reflection but halts and forecloses it. The claims are several and equally spurious: Jesus wasn’t born on…
Abraham's life in Genesis is a series of trials. He travels hundreds of miles from his family into a new land, flees from a famine into the hands of a king who takes his wife, and after returning, has to rescue his brother from a war. He's involved with two…
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Robert Bellamy states the thrust of his "republican defense of constitutional democracy" up front ( Political Constitutionalism , viii). He rejects the common assumption that "a written, justiciable constitution, incorporating a bill of rights" is a "necessary safeguard against the abuse of power by democratic governments." Written constitutions often have…
Adam Kirsch can't bring himself to say that poet Richard Wilbur, who died last weekend, was a Christian. In a 2004 New Yorker review , he comes close - recognizing religious themes and describing him as a "Transcendentalist." Kirsch recognizes that Wilbur's religious vision infused his poetry: "the clean laundry…
In Benedict XVI: A Guide for the Perplexed (33-4), Tracey Rowland takes note of the Pope's sharp critique of popular music, including contemporary Christian music. Benedict "quotes Adorno’s judgement that ‘the fundamental characteristic of popular music is standardization’ and describes this as ‘incompatible with the culture of the Gospels, which…
Evolutionary theorists want to present evolution as a theory of everything. Benedict XVI ( Truth and Tolerance , 180-1) doesn't buy it. Philosophically, the question is "whether reason, or rationality, stands at the beginning of all things and is grounded in the basis of all things or not. The question…
In his book on sacral Kingship (90-1), Francis Oakley points to the disjunction between Augustine himself and the medieval writers to claimed his mantle. Augustine's political theology in the City of God has been read through the lends of his anti-Donatist writings. A more theocratic Augustine results: "the Augustine whom…
Gaul is still divided into three parts, according to Stefan McDaniel in a 2016 essay in First Things . Three parties are vying to determine the future of France - deconstructionists, children of 1968; reconstructionists, in search for new values to guide the country, including consideration of Islam; and classicists,…
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