Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Pastor John Piper has written on why he (probably) won’t be voting in this month’s presidential election. Reading his argument, I couldn’t help wondering if voting has a cultic significance to Piper. As much as self-admitted Christian Trump-voters are characterized as cult followers, Never Trump Christians often strike me as…
Seek happiness in tranquillity and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself… –– Victor Frankenstein In Mary Shelley’s classic novel, Victor Frankenstein is a young intellectual with an excessive thirst for glory and worldwide acclaim. Having lost his beloved mother, Frankenstein works to…
“Our daughter is just like a baby hippo,” my wife says to me as I hang my coat up. “After we watched a video of hippos munching whole watermelons, she sat down to her own watermelon lunch. She gobbled them up with those same puffy cheeks and big eyes.” My…
Christian compromise with Nazi Germany’s political leadership is well documented in painful detail. There was resistance, but it was the exception rather than the rule. German Christianity was terribly timid. Leadership lacked spiritual strength because of serious Biblical ignorance and unbelief. But it was not just the leaders. Christians in…
Can a Christian vote for Donald Trump? That might seem like a surprising question given the widespread evangelical support for the President. Yet for a growing number of evangelicals, to vote for Trump is to endorse his moral repugnancy and further discredit gospel-believing Christians who have sold their birthright for…
Thirty-eight years is a long time to take getting somewhere (Deut. 2:14). You could just ask anyone in the unfaithful generation of people whom God brought to the edge of the Promised Land the first time under Moses—if they were still alive, that is (Num. 14:22-23, 32-35). But there are…
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Julian Young offers a neat summary of the Arthur Schopenhauer (the "first European Buddhist") at the TLS . Schopenhauer's philosophy can be pinpointed by contrast with two better-known thinkers. Against Hegel's fantastic " Bildungsroman , a story of the ever-increasing realization of 'reason' in human affairs," Schopenhauer offered a thoroughgoing,…
"How is it possible," asks Terry Teachout , "that a man who made his conducting debut when Grover Cleveland was president should still be sufficiently well known and revered that most of his recordings remain in print to this day?" Teachout thinks that Harvey Sachs's Toscanini: Musician of Conscience comes…
The first published book of Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentinian poet and short-story writer, was Fervor de Buenos Aires . Borges later wrote, “ Fervor de Buenos Aires foreshadows everything I would do afterward.” It was a slapdash production, Borges claimed in his autobiography: “The book was actually printed…
John Colmer observes in his study of E.M. Forster that Forster's novels transpose Christian terms into a secular key: "a whole set of religious terms - salvation, grace, conversion, transfiguration - become assimilated into an essentially secular vision. . . . Men now seek their happiness on this earth not…
Richard Florida's 2002 Rise of the Creative Class was a manifesto for urban hipness. As Joseph Bottum sums up the book , Florida argued that "cities thrive when these creative types are allowed to build the creative economy. Their tolerance for alternative lifestyles and their acceptance of unconventional housing broke…
"Medieval tolerance" sounds like an oxymoron. Everyone knows the medievals were in tolerant. Everyone knows that tolerance was invented in the modern world. Everyone who knows such things is wrong. Istvan Bejczy demonstrates in a 1997 essay that medieval thinkers had a well-developed concept of tolerance. He goes further than…
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