Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
"The faithful use of sacraments, and indeed a fully sacramental view of creation, is vital to the life of the Church. Baptism and the Lord's Supper are rites that directly shape the community and the Body, because they were given by God for that express purpose. A deficient practice of…
Weightlessness is fun. At the beginning of Gravity (2013) , we can see one astronaut dancing the Macarena and another one playing with his jetpack. They like it out there in the space. Apart from zero-gravity they can enjoy beautiful views, and even the silence is likable, although Matt Kowalski…
I recently went to a lunch that is more or less quarterly. About a dozen of us go. It is a lunch held in honor of a retired professor of religion and philosophy. I have been one of his acquaintances for more than 40 years. In his tenure as professor,…
Why Theopolis? Don't we already have seminaries and Bible colleges and other institutions for theological education? Why do we need another one? I get this question now and again. I ask myself this question even more often. What follows is a partial answer. Back in the 1990s, seminaries seemed to…
I think the logic of the Lutheran Reformation can be summarized in one sentence, attributed to Luther himself: "God does not need your good works, but your neighbor does." The first half of that statement is justification by faith . God doesn't need our works to satisfy his justice or…
If you are looking to start a fight with Christians, there is hardly a better subject to do so than the arts. Music, movies, paintings, and literature have provided no small battlegrounds for Christians to war. We are emotionally invested in the arts. A song, a book, or a film…
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It sure seems that the story of Joseph is a typological foreshadowing of the life of Jesus. Joseph is hated by his brothers; turned over to Gentiles; falsely accused; thrown into pit and prison; raised up, finally set on a throne, from which he gathers and distributes bread. Of course,…
Jock Young ( Vertigo of Late Modernity ) discerns two sorts of “othering” in contemporary life: “the first is a conservative demonisation which projects negative attributes on the other and thereby grants positive attributes to oneself The second, very common yet rarely recognised, is a liberal othering where the other…
In several dense paragraphs in The Fragmented World of the Social , Axel Honneth describes the Gyorgy Lukacs's analysis of the fragmentation caused by capitalist society and the romantic reaction. There is, for starters, the fragmentation of the human being himself, induced by the capitalist separation of the worker from…
In his little book, Alone Again , Zygmunt Bauman summarizes his characteristic themes: We live in a liquid world, nothing permanent, nothing solid, nothing predictable. Typically pungent, Bauman points to “the overall tendency to dismantle, deregulate and dissipate the once solid and relatively lasting frames in which the concerns and…
Jeremiah 46 is an oracle against Egypt, which, like Judah, is threatened by the advancing forces of Babylon. In the space of four verses (20-23), Jeremiah runs through a dizzying series of metaphors. Egypt is a pretty heifer (v. 20), and Nebuchadnezzar's army is a “horsefly” that is going to…
The late Jock Young observes in his Vertigo of Late Modernity that our period is characterized by “a combination of factors, some long existing yet unique in their combination, others pre-existent yet transformed in the present period. The impact revolves around three axes, the disembeddedness of everyday life, the awareness…
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