Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
When I wrote my commentary on Ecclesiastes A Table in the Mist I took Eccl. 11:1-2 as a reference to the risk of international trade. It sure did seem to me like a reference to Solomon’s risky trade with other nations. Israel exported grain (bread) and Solomon’s ships returned to…
When we read an alphabetical psalm in English, we miss the fact that each verse begins with a new letter of the Hebrew alphabet. I have found one way to get around this, which is for the leader to announce something relevant about each letter before reading his half of…
How does the Lord’s Supper proclaim the death of Jesus until He comes? (1 Corinthians 11:26). Historically, liturgists have attempted to locate some act in the rite of the Supper that corresponds to the death of Jesus: the fraction (breaking of bread), or the fact that bread and wine are…
These notes are posted here by request. We all now live in the age of slob worship thanks to the “sixties.” I never experienced sitting for prayer until 20 years ago. Jesus was unhappy when His disciples could not watch and pray for one hour. Today’s slob Christians complain if…
On September 11, 2001, Jesus brought judgment upon the United States of America. Following His normal procedure, He used an even more evil force to do it (Habakkuk 1-3). The warning Jesus gives throughout the Bible to those He uses to punish others is that they need to repent, or…
Because of Donald Trump, the “Birther” issue is heating up. It is not going away, and is only part of a larger cluster of issues in regard to the President. Virtually all of the relevant documents concerning who he is and where he has been, have been suppressed, at great…
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Writing in the 1955, Walter Lippmann already discerned that the US was approaching the limits of toleration and facing a crisis of civil discourse. In his Essays on the Public Philosophy , he writes: "As we know from the variety and sharpness of schisms and sects in our time, we…
If we wanted to remodel a church, we'd hire a general contractor as project manager, and he'd hire the various carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and other craftsmen to do the work. Not Josiah. When he sets out to repair the temple, he calls on the musicians . Commenting on 2 Chronicles…
In his contribution to Spoken and Unspoken Thanks , Kevin Reinhart observes that "in English both 'thanks' and 'gratitude' belong to the domain of individual inner life and using them in a religious context mirrors our Western understanding of religion as interior and affective, as dispositional rather than operational" (116).…
"The division . . . between 'corporate' and 'private' worship must be discarded," writes Alexander Schmemann in his Introduction to Liturgical Theology (24). He explains: "The purpose of worship is to constitute the Church, precisely to bring what is 'private' into the new life, to transform it into what belongs…
Adam Gopnik reviews Frederick Crews's Freud in The New Yorker , and along the way to the review gives a brisk overview of the spread of Freudianism from Vienna to Hampstead to Berkeley, where Crews spent his career teaching. Crews was among the earliest Freudian literary scholars, but has devoted…
For many Christians today, the purity rules of ancient Israel seem bizarre and opaque. We'd never think of trying to observe them. This "disenchantment" of purity is a sign of the power and success of the Reformation, because medieval Christians were still very much at home in the world of…
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