Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Abbreviated Introduction to the Series Scripture is absolutely dripping with animal metaphors. Animal traits, characteristics, and appearances are attributed to God, Man, Angels, Nations, Armies. Since animals are the lowest creature in the three-tiered hierarchy, they are useful to metaphorically focus on a single aspect of God (bold like a…
Many years ago, while perusing Janice Anderson’s revised doctoral dissertation, Matthew’s Narrative Web: Over, and Over, and Over again , I was impressed by her attention to literary structures of repetition within and across Matthew’s Gospel. 1 Her research, in part, nudged me closer toward my present conviction that Matthew…
Abbreviated Introduction to the Series Scripture is absolutely dripping with animal metaphors. Animal traits, characteristics, and appearances are attributed to God, Man, Angels, Nations, Armies. Since animals are the lowest creature in the three-tiered hierarchy, they are useful to metaphorically focus on a single aspect of God (bold like a…
“Like a lily among the thorns, so is my love among the maidens… My beloved is mine and I am his; he pastures among the lilies.” Song 2:2, 16 In chapter two of the Song of Solomon, the Beloved compares his Love to a lily among thorns. The language of…
Introduction From the very beginning, angels and animals have played mediating roles between God and Man. Just as the World was made three-tiered (Heaven, Earth, Deep), so the creatures were made (Angels, Men, Animals). Before Christ came to build the permanent bridge across the chasm between God and Man, various…
Matthew 13, the third major discourse of the apostle’s gospel, is comprised almost entirely of parables. While it may seem that all the parables serve the same purpose in fulfilling the prophet Isaiah (Matthew 13:14), the parables found in verses 44–52, at the very least, function outside that purpose. This…
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In the preface to Receptive Ecumenism , Paul Murray describes the three “voices” of the collection of essays in these terms: “(1) the dreaming of dreams; (2) the testing of such dreams for their viability; and (3) the discerning together of what might either hinder or promote their embodied ecclesial…
In a series of studies, Michael Tomasello and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology have attempted to isolate what makes human cognition different from that of higher primates. Through a series of studies, they concluded that the key difference is what they call “shared intentionality,” the “we”…
After the two witnesses, the seventh angel blows the seventh trumpet, and loud voices of praise break out in heaven (Revelation 11:15). We’re back in heaven, and the twenty-four elders prostrate themselves before the Lord, the pantokrator , and praise Him because the kingdom of this world ( tou kosmou…
Solomon’s throne had six steps (1 Kings 10), with two lions flanking each step. That means 12 lions. Twelve lions are twelve tribes. But not all the tribes are leonine. Look back at Genesis 49, and you’ll find a donkey tribe (Issachar), a serpent tribe (Dan), a doe tribe (Naphtali),…
Richard Ayoade’s 2013 The Double , based on a Dostoevsky novella, is a dark comedy in every sense of the word. It takes place in a shrouded world, where all trains run underground, all lights are dim or flickering, where the few outdoor scenes occur at night. The comedy comes…
Building on John Paul II’s theology of the body, Adam Cooper’s Holy Eros sketches out a “liturgical theology of the body.” He aims to show “how the liturgy bodily enacts the truth of our Christian faith, and how that truth in turn is expressed in the structure and bodily actions…
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