Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Creationism is debated widely in the US, especially when it comes to teaching creation as an alternative theory of origins in public schools. Every few months, there’s another poll showing that many Americans still believe Ussher’s claim that the world was created around 4000 BC, which always elicits a contemptuous…
Walker Percy died in 1990, but his six published novels and his collections of essays are more relevant than when he wrote them. Percy was an American Dostoevsky, and that was no accident. “The European novels,” he says in a 1974 interview, “are more philosophical, more novels of ideas.” Dostoevsky,…
The Spirit is God’s agent for renewing the creation, for restoring bonds between nations, for knitting together people into the body of Christ. The Spirit is the renewer of the world, and the bond of all relations. That means that if you want your family to be knit together, if…
In their basic physical sense , the verbs translated as "persecute" in the Bible mean “chase” or “pursue,” and that fits the context quite naturally. As Pharaoh “pursued” (LXX, dioko ; Heb. radaph ) Israel into the wilderness, for example, so the dragon chases the woman back to her place…
Seng-Kong Tan’s Fullness Received and Returned is a densely argued, thoroughly researched, contextually sensitive study of participation in the soteriology of Jonathan Edwards. Along the way, Tan deals with many of the central themes in Edwards’s theology. As with many recent studies of Edwards, Tan’s monograph demonstrates both Edwards’s creativity…
The title of James Joyce’s first novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man indicates that it is a bildungsroman , a story of formation that describes the formative experiences of a poet who aspires to artistic greatness. The education described is Joyce’s own. The novel recounts the failing…
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Someone asked me recently about my views on church and state. I replied that I advocate a "Christendom model" of church-state relations. Then I proceeded to qualify. When I was done qualifying, I suddenly wondered whether what I call "Christendom" corresponds to what other people understand by the word. It…
Ezra begins where 2 Chronicles ends, with the decree of Cyrus. Some scholars have argued that the repetition indicates that the books were once united. It's said that the doubling is an ancient literary device to knot together two sections of a text. Whether that is the case or not,…
James Simpson briefly reviews the career of the 17th-century iconoclast William Dowsing in his history of iconoclasm, Under the Hammer . What motivated Dowsing, he argues, wasn't an effort to prioritize the word over the image, but a quest for "jurisdictional clarity." With the triumph of Parliament, the complex jurisdictional…
The key question regarding Freud, says Rosenstock-Huessy ( In the Cross of Reality , 266), is "Whom did Freud obey when he began to develop his theory?" The question arises because "in Freud's relational system there is no place for Sigmund Freud's own experience." He shares this distinction of an…
Alexandra Schwartz's New Yorker essay on self-improvement movements ( "Improving Ourselves to Death" ) starts out breezily enough, but it turns grim pretty fast. The "death" in her title isn't metaphorical. She summarizes the experiment of Carl Cederström and André Spicer, who tried to improve one area of their lives…
In a TLS review of Kontantin Barsht's Drawings and Calligraphy of Fyodor Dostoevsky , Robert Bird reminds us that Dostoevsky was a "trained draughtsman" who "thought in images no less than in words: "He wrote frequently about painting, and many of his key terms suggest visual, rather than verbal communication,…
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