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Writing

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

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Soothing Pain is not Enough

In Infantilised: How Our Culture Killed Adulthood (2024), Keith Hayward says that we live in a “therapy culture.” This is “a way of thinking” about upbringing and education “when the values and language of counseling and psychotherapy break out from the clinical setting and take hold within the cultural imagination…

by Bogumil JarmulakJune 5, 2025
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Biblical Theology

Sarah, Abraham’s Helper

In Genesis 20:13, Abraham reveals that when he and his wife left their father’s house, he asked Sarah to call him her brother, not her husband. Abraham looked ahead to the land before them, a land full of violence, and he didn’t trust men there. He believed they would see…

by Donald LinnemeyerJune 3, 2025
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Biblical Studies

Why You Should Read the Biblical Languages

Introduction I am sitting in a rural village in the northern part of a West African country. I’m in the courtyard of an imam. Two other Christians are with me. It’s hot and dusty, but we have come to read Scripture and talk together. As a local Christian takes the…

by Calvin HaysMay 29, 2025
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On Merriment

This is the wey to al good aventure; Be glad, thou reder, and thy sorwe of-caste -Geoffrey Chaucer, The Parlement of Foulys, 131–132 In January I had the honor and delight of speaking at the Church of the Redeemer’s 2025 Christendom Lectures. What follows are drawn from the notes for…

by Mark BriansMay 27, 2025
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Galatians

The Letter: A Fictional Account of the Writing of Galatians

I had often heard that wisdom is visible in the countenance and I thought that I had seen examples of it in the past. But the man who stood before me, loosely holding the reins of the mare and peering around him with sharp interest, gave no outward hint of…

by Christian LeithartMay 22, 2025
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Revelation

Satan’s Final Throne Room Accusation

And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light — 1 Corinthians 11:14 In Revelation 5:2, the first of three “Mighty Angels” appears before the throne of God and preaches in a great voice, asking, “Who is worthy to open the book, and to loose the…

by Ryan SpencerMay 20, 2025

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Gone Fishin’

June 24, 2014

Impure Holiness

Isaiah 65 piles up charges of idolatry and impurity against Israel. They are supposed to offer continuous sacrifices, but their sacrifices are a continuous provocation (65:3). They build their altars from bricks rather than from stones, as the law requires (65:3). The sacrificial smoke doesn’t sooth Yahweh but is an…

June 23, 2014

Coding Trance

In an essay at Slate , David Auerbach tells a story about John Harris, a game-programmer: “While working on an 8-bit Atari port of Frogger in the early 1980s, Harris said, “’ glued my hands to the keyboard.’ One day he started programming midafternoon, losing himself in work. The next…

June 23, 2014

Smart Dumb

P oet Kenneth Goldsmith gives a taxonomy of smartness and dumbness. There are various permutations. He prefers dumb, but it has to be smart dumb: “There is dumb dumb and there is smart dumb. There is also smart smart. Dumb dumb is plain dumb and smart smart is plain smart.…

June 23, 2014

Kynics and Cynics

In a 1987 review of Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason , Neil Wilson observes that for Sloterdijk “cynicism is enlightenment turned sour: a sourness which results from the self-denial that self-survival in a society dominated by instrumental rationality requires” (55). It is not a new attitude, but an ancient…

June 23, 2014

Physiognamy’s revenge

Peter Sloterdijk distinguishes in his Critique of Cynical Reason (139-40) between the objectifying and distancing aims of Enlightenment thought and the inescapable “physiognomic sense” of life among fleshly humans: “Whereas the process of civilization, whose core is constituted by the sciences, teaches us to distance ourselves from people and things…

June 23, 2014

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