Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto Me. In 2005, God blessed our family with our third child, our second daughter, whom we named Bethany. As soon as Bethany was born, we knew there was something different about her. Unlike her two older siblings, who were born…
Christian, what is it that we believe? While Creeds like the Nicene and Apostle’s have been fundamental pieces of Christian liturgy and life, the American Church is highly unattached to these classic statements. From this creedal phobia has arisen the popular “No Creed, but Christ” slogan. Such slogan, of course,…
Revisiting William Cavanaugh’s devastating 2009 The Myth of Religious Violence . The myth of Cavanaugh’s title is a well-known one. According to the myth, religion is a distinct sphere of human life and practice from the rest of human social life, a universal impulse in human beings, and is dogmatic,…
19 Then the same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews, came Jesus and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you. 20 And when he had so…
An octave is a repetition, a repetition with a difference. It’s not the first note played again , but the first note played at a higher pitch. Octaves have always marked new beginnings. Hebrew boys were circumcised on the eighth day. Firstborn sheep were dedicated to Yahweh on the eighth…
We say Jesus’ resurrection is good news. It wasn’t good news for the disciples on the first Easter. More like perplexing, bewildering news. For others, it wasn’t perplexing, and it certainly wasn’t good. It was plain old bad news. Early in Luke’s gospel, Herod is terrified that Jesus might be…
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S arah Eekhoff Zylstra reports in Christianity Today on efforts to change laws concerning church construction in Egypt: “Current laws, which have been in place since 1856, require Christians to get the consent of the local Muslim community—and the country’s president—before building a church.” At times, “Christians were required to…
D arian Leader notes in What Is Madness? that the various theories of madness that have been developed over the past fifty years are “more or less unknown outside a very narrow professional field” (2). That research has been undertaken within a psychoanalytic framework, and is barely known even to…
Haiku is the most mockable poetic form. It seems easy, and a lot of bad haiku gets written. The best haiku exemplifies the nature of poetry, which I have described as a “ concentrated excess of language .” Reading a well-constructive haiku is like viewing a scene in a flash…
A s Rhodri Lewis points out , the evidence that Hamlet is young is overwhelming: “Claudius counsels Hamlet that his enduring display of grief for his father is ‘unmanly,' a term whose persuasive force depends on Hamlet aspiring to, rather than already having attained, the condition of manliness; Laertes thinks…
E ach day the sun rises and sets. Each year, the sun does the same, ascending during the spring to its zenith in the summer solstice and then descending again to its nadir in the winter solstice. As Jean Hani points out ( Symbolism of the Christian Temple , 73-4),…
T he Reformers read Revelation as a prophetic outline of history, and so identified the beast and harlot with the Catholic church of their time. In response, Catholics developed “preterist” and “futurist” readings of the book, which viewed the Apocalypse as a prophecy of fulfilled events of the distant past,…
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