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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Perception is never merely sensible. A professional photographer points out that our “visual” impressions of people are formed not merely by visual factors but by such factors as the context in which we see someone, their personality and our rapport, and so forth. We can come away from an encounter…
Jonathan Dollimore argues in Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture that the West has been defined by a particular linking of thanatos and eros, which is associated with the problem of mutability. He quotes Yeats to the effect that we love what vanishes, and there is no more to…
Exhortation for December 28: New Year’s is frequently a time for assessment, and for making resolutions and setting plans for the coming year. With New Year’s Day coming up this week, I am devoting the sermon to sketching what we want the church to be and to do in Moscow.…
Political religiosity in America is a strange bird, and add journalism to the mix and it approachs mythical proportions. Consider Howard Dean: Yesterday, Drudge was listing a report on Dean’s plan to highlight his religious background as he campaigns in the South. Dean is a Congregationalist who says Jesus has…
The resurrection of Jesus, and our participation in it, is of course foundational for the “comic” vision of Christianity. Barth, however, expresses this in a particularly sharp way, when he describes how the Christian looks back to death and the grave as a past event, and forward to resurrection. The…
Sermon outline for December 28: What Are Our Plans for Moscow? INTRODUCTION During the recent furor, the question has been posed to Christ Church (and, implicitly, to Trinity), “What are your plans for Moscow?” To answer that question, we must understand what the church is, and what she’s called to…
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