Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
“What’s the fastest route” he asks me as we quickly come to a stop behind a sea of red brake lights. I pull out my phone and map all the options. Every way is red with traffic backed up. Deep down I must be a small town girl because traffic…
Dear Friend of Theopolis, I have signed a stack of documents in the years since we started Theopolis, but my heart jumped a few beats as I looked at the thick lease contract. “This is real,” I thought. “This makes it really real.” Theopolis has been real for nearly three…
In the Edenic world of Perelandra, from C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, Ransom notices something about how the Green Lady treats the animals: [1] “There was in her face an authority, in her caresses a condescension, [2] which by taking seriously the inferiority of her adorers made them somehow less inferior…
In my previous two articles, I argued for the significance of the fact that baptism addresses our bodies in their objectivity. In the body, the self has an existence that runs deeper than our consciousness, decision, self-expression, and action. In washing our passive bodies, baptism seals us with an anticipatory…
Judah is a sinful nation, weighed down with iniquity. They are not the seed of Abraham, but the seed of iniquity. Their worship is abominable to Yahweh, because their hands are covered with innocent blood. They have not done good, or sought justice, or reproved the ruthless, or defended the…
Although we tend to define ourselves by our subjectivity —our perceptions, thoughts, feelings, decisions, actions—we are frequently forgetful of the objectivity of the self as body, the reality of the self that underlies and precedes all of our subjectivity. The body is the site of our ‘givenness’, where we are…
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David Aune has argued that the heavenly court scene of Revelation 4-5 “bears such a striking resemblance to the ceremonial of the imperial court and cult that the latter can only be a parody of the former” (5). He proposes this against the main “major competing view” that “the heavenly…
Will Rees says in his TLS review of Judith Butler's Senses of the Subject that the “biggest topic of discussion” has been Butler's writing style, which he characterizes as “torturous.” It's not just the style. In her poststructuralist early work, Butler argues that “gender identities are constructed by the machinations…
The Economist reports on “an immigrant-led surge in London churchgoing. Weekly participation in Christian services in the capital has grown by 16% since 2005. Most devout Londoners (88%) worship outside the ranks of the established church whose spires pierce the skyline; about a third are Pentecostal.” It is the same…
Drawing on the work of CS Peirce, Giovanni Maddalena ( The Philosophy of Gesture ) argues that pragmatism must be understood as more than an anti-Cartesian movement in philosophy. To the critique of Descartes, it adds a critique of Kant. He summarizes Peirce's critique. Kant is a nominalist, which means…
The Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas has a clear surface structure. A first part, two parts of the second part, and a third part. But that obvious structure doesn't tell the whole story. Thomas explains the structure of the treatise at the outset (1, 2): “Because the chief aim of…
In his Climax of Prophecy , Richard Bauckham’s devotes a long, complicated, fascinating chapter to an analysis of the phrase “tribes, tongues, nations, peoples” (and variations) in Revelation. The arrangement of the lists varies, but the variations are not random. They reinforce substantive connections between different parts of the book.…
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