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Writing

Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.

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Creation

Why Genesis Matters

Creationism is debated widely in the US, especially when it comes to teaching creation as an alternative theory of origins in public schools. Every few months, there’s another poll showing that many Americans still believe Ussher’s claim that the world was created around 4000 BC, which always elicits a contemptuous…

by Peter LeithartAugust 20, 2014
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Books

Canary in the Coal Shaft

Walker Percy died in 1990, but his six published novels and his collections of essays are more relevant than when he wrote them. Percy was an American Dostoevsky, and that was no accident. “The European novels,” he says in a 1974 interview, “are more philosophical, more novels of ideas.” Dostoevsky,…

by Peter LeithartAugust 18, 2014
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Children

Parenting in the Spirit

The Spirit is God’s agent for renewing the creation, for restoring bonds between nations, for knitting together people into the body of Christ. The Spirit is the renewer of the world, and the bond of all relations. That means that if you want your family to be knit together, if…

by Peter LeithartAugust 13, 2014
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Revelation

Hunter Into Prey

In their basic physical sense , the verbs translated as "persecute" in the Bible mean “chase” or “pursue,” and that fits the context quite naturally. As Pharaoh “pursued” (LXX, dioko ; Heb. radaph ) Israel into the wilderness, for example, so the dragon chases the woman back to her place…

by Peter LeithartAugust 11, 2014
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Books

Edwards Our Contemporary

Seng-Kong Tan’s Fullness Received and Returned is a densely argued, thoroughly researched, contextually sensitive study of participation in the soteriology of Jonathan Edwards. Along the way, Tan deals with many of the central themes in Edwards’s theology. As with many recent studies of Edwards, Tan’s monograph demonstrates both Edwards’s creativity…

by Peter LeithartAugust 6, 2014
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Art

Portrait of the Artist as Aesthetic Martyr

The title of James Joyce’s first novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man indicates that it is a bildungsroman , a story of formation that describes the formative experiences of a poet who aspires to artistic greatness. The education described is Joyce’s own. The novel recounts the failing…

by Peter LeithartAugust 4, 2014

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Sexual Laws of Leviticus 18

The sexual laws of Leviticus 18 have long been puzzling on a couple of levels. The logic of the arrangement of the laws is difficult to discern; the gaps in the laws seems inexplicable (no prohibition, for instance, of father-daughter incest); and the question of how obedience to these laws…

November 2, 2004

Righteousness in Romans 1

The phrase “righteousness of God” in Romans 1:17 has been the subject of considerable dispute in recent years, with many abandoning a standard Protestant interpretation of the passage (i.e., that the righteousness of God refers to the righteousness that God gives) in favor of a more redemptive-historical understanding (righteousness as…

November 2, 2004

Matthew 8 and Sodomy

Theodore Jennings and Tat-Siong Benny Liew have a curious article in the Fall 2004 issue of JBL . They offer an alternative interpretation of the story of the centurion of Matthew 8, an interpretation that hangs on taking “PAIS” not as “slave” or “son” but as “boy-lover.” They find plenty…

November 2, 2004
Literature

Romanticism and Spain

In a review of Joseph von Eichendorff’s collected works ( TLS , October 1, 2004), Carol Tully points out the fascination of German Romantics for Spain: “For the poets and theoreticians of the Romantic age in German, Spain was somewhere very special indeed. The nation and its culture were eulogized…

November 2, 2004

Two Kinds of Righteousness

Some intriguing quotations from Luther’s treatise on Two Kinds of Righteousness . 1) The first sort is “alien righteousness”: “The first is alien righteousness, that is the righteousness of another, instilled from without. This is the righteousness of Christ by which he justifies though faith, as it is written in…

October 27, 2004

Eucharist Lecture #3

INTRODUCTION Because of the imperfections of the reformation of the Eucharist in the sixteenth century, and because of the alien influences that have affected the practice of the Eucharist in the centuries since, there is much left to do in order to renew the Table. The Reformation must at this…

October 27, 2004

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