Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
One common trope which is regularly invoked in current debates about the defensibility versus the danger of Christian engagement with critical theories (or, species of Critical Theory) is the idea of “ eating the meat but spitting out the bones .” Usually not far behind is a nod to the…
I am writing about the book of Proverbs in the Bible and “Eschatology.” I don’t refer only to the end of time, or “last things” that will happen in history before it ends as we know it. I am referring to all times of God’s judgment wherein He ends an…
“Unity” is the word of the day. In his inaugural address, Joe Biden invoked St. Augustine to inspire Americans to come together around certain shared values. As others have recently argued, Biden misreads Augustine in important ways. My argument here is that if we seek political unity and civic health…
This is part two of a series which began here ( The Half Shekel Temple Tax ) in which I answer back, hoping not to rebut but to glorify, some observations Peter Leithart made in a thought-provoking piece about the Temple Tax as atonement ( Atonement Money ). Adding economic…
It is now commonplace to characterize Wokeness (or “ Wokeism ”) as a religion , or at least religion-like . What I would like to explore is an elaboration on this emergent consensus, supplementing it with some theological analysis. Wokeness, I propose, is a form of post-Protestant neopaganism. It resembles…
Science Fiction movies often retell old stories and myths with greater impact for modern people. A being from another world or a technologically advanced human can embody an ancient god or demon and viewers are suddenly unwittingly enthralled by Ur tales that emerged from hundreds of years of human experience.…
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In his Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things , George Lakoff tells about the Australian aboriginal tribe of the Dyirbal, who speak a language that classifies everything into four categories. One of these, “balan,” includes “women, bandicoots, dogs, platypuses, echidnas, some fish, birds, fireflies, scorpions, crickets, the hairy mary grub, anything…
In the delightful opening chapter to his Concept of Mind (1949), Gilbert Ryle explains that Descartes’s mind-body dualism (“ghost in the machine,” as Ryle famously put it) was a response to the mechanization of the world: “Descartes found in himself two conflicting motives. As a man of scientific genius he…
In the delightful opening chapter to his Concept of Mind (1949), Gilbert Ryle explains that Descartes’s mind-body dualism (“ghost in the machine,” as Ryle famously put it) was a response to the mechanization of the world: “Descartes found in himself two conflicting motives. As a man of scientific genius he…
In his book on Hegel, Charles Taylor summarizes the crique Hegel brings against Descartes. For Hegel, Descartes aims to unite thought and external reality, but the manner he uses to do that ends up losing both. The cogito is an “assertion of an immediate identity between thought and being,” an…
According to the account of Raymond Martin and John Barresi in their recent book on the rise and fall of the soul and self, several of the church fathers answered the dilemma raised by personal continuity through death and resurrection by proposing a relational view of identity: “What that means,…
Ethnic identity politics, Eric Hobsbawm argues, arises as an effort to established impermeable boundaries in a situation where boundaries are permeable: “The very fluidity of ethnicity in urban societies made its choice as the only criterion of the group arbitrary and artificial. In the USA, except for Blacks, Hispanics, and…
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