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Writing

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

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Christmas

Rachel’s Reward: A Review of The Night of the Hunter

Thus says the Lord: “A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are no more” (Jer 31:15). The Night of the Hunter belongs on every Christian’s Christmas list. My family has even…

by Brian McLainDecember 30, 2025
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Advent

Angels, Angels, and More Angels

One important part of Jesus's birth narrative is the presence of angels. The angel Gabriel appeared to the Virgin Mary, announcing that she would bear a son. And then, on the night Jesus was born, a whole host of angels appeared to the shepherds. Angels are mysterious creatures to us.…

by Adam McIntoshDecember 24, 2025
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Culture

Devilish Irony: The Blind Service of The Satanic Temple

I was settled nicely into my chair and listening to the conversation in an undergrad religion seminar, my last required course to graduate. Though a few Christians sat scattered around the room, the course itself was dedicated to poking holes in traditional understandings of the Bible: our readings deconstructed notions…

by Alexander HibbsDecember 18, 2025
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Christmas

The Typology of Home Alone

God’s symbols belong to Him and to His people. They are constantly at work in the world, including the world of film, music, painting, architecture, and other artforms. You cannot escape God’s symbols or the meaning He has woven into the created order. Artists use and borrow God’s symbols, whether…

by Brian MoatsDecember 17, 2025
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Theology

The Old Testament’s Multiethnic Israel

For centuries, Christians identified Israel in the Old Testament as a single, literal ethnic group, often called “the Jews.” Even supersessionists – those who believed the Church superseded Israel – assumed the clear-cut, technical definition of “Israel” in the Bible is the ethnic group. However, a deeper dive into Genesis,…

by John CarpenterDecember 9, 2025
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Matthew

Mission Accomplished: John the Baptizer and the Highway to Holiness (Matthew 11:1–6)

Misreading Intent In the opening verses of Matthew 11, the reader is confronted immediately by John the baptizer who has been imprisoned since 4:12. John poses a question to Jesus, inquiring from prison as to whether or not he is Israel’s awaited Messiah or if they should anticipate another: “Are…

by Jonathan SedlakDecember 2, 2025
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Science

Myths of Science

Galileo Goes To Jail , a 2009 collection of essays edited by Ronald Numbers, examines 25 myths of science and religion. The essays aren't defenses of religion by any means; they instead aim at complicating the received scientific triumphalism and set records straight. Maurice A. Finocchiaro tackles myth #8, that…

February 23, 2018

The Sin of Tolerance

The late Billy Graham from a 1 959 issue of Christianity Today . 1959!! One of the pet words of this age is "tolerance." It is a good word, but we have tried to stretch it over too great an area of life. We have applied it too often where…

February 23, 2018

Modernity as Aspiration

"Modernity," writes Jason A. Josephson-Storm, "is first and foremost the sign of a rupture . . . a device for positing significant historical breaks" ( The Myth of Disenchantment , 7). By designating something as "modern," we associate it with novelty, up-to-dateness, "the current." But modernity is also a spatial…

February 23, 2018

Imago Dei

Frances Young ( God's Presence , 173-4) offers this summary of the post-Nicene consensus concerning the image of God in man: "Athanasius and the Cappadocians, those who fashioned the notion of theopoiesis / theosis and recognized that it implied Nicene orthodoxy, were those who had a sense of the interrelationship…

February 23, 2018
Philosophy

Philosophic Wonder

Everyone wonders - children, “savages,” men and women at one another. Philosophers wonder too, Rosenzweig says ( Understanding the Sick and the Healthy ), but they respond to wonder differently from the rest of us. The rest of us are “adrift on the river Life, borne on, wonderment and all.”…

February 23, 2018

Nominal Sociology

Sociologists, Rosenstock-Huessy charges, often formulate their theories in this fashion: "an obscure Force A and a Relation B . . . affect Mr Y." Sociologists "pretend that their science address a nameless world" ( In the Cross of Reality , 4). No such nameless world exists: "X and Y are…

February 23, 2018

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