Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
We lost Crimea. That is very clear. Putin proved he was not lying when he said he would place women and children ahead of his soldiers to storm Ukrainian military bases. Russian soldiers did exactly that with women (some who volunteered and some who were forced). Russia now occupies all…
Sound is an indicator of life and energy. “Sound signals the present use of power, since sound must be in active production to exist at all.” Things don’t have to be alive to make themselves visible, and “a primitive hunter can see, feel, smell, and taste an elephant when the…
In the most famous section of his best-known novel, Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov brings forward his case against God. He opens with a horrific litany of outrages against children. Turkish soldiers make a baby laugh and then shoot a pistol into his face. A little girl is beaten, thrashed, kicked by…
At the heart of Esther Lightcap Meek's splendid Little Manual for Knowing is a concept she picked up from Michael Polanyi, "subsidiary-focal integration." The concept begins from the insight that all our knowing, all our experience, is double. We focus on something, but we are capable of "indwelling" that focal…
Jesus promises the overcomers of Pergamum "hidden manna" and a "white stone." The hidden manna is often linked with the manna stashed away in the ark of the covenant. The white stone has proved more elusive. Exodus tells us that manna was white (Exodus 16:31) and like bdellium (Numbers 11:7),…
Leviticus 23 begins with a reference to “Yahweh’s appointed times” ( mo’ade-YHWH ). Mo’ed is the common term for the feasts of Israel. A few dimensions to this term. First, it means “appointed time” or “designated time.” It is a time set by Yahweh. Yahweh has claimed certain times as…
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N ineteenth-century radical Henry Hunt was once offered a clerical post worth a thousand pounds a year. His duties? Nothing “for six days out of seven but to hunt, shoot, and fish by day, and play cards, talk scandal with the old maids of the parish, and win the money…
R aphael is, we might think, a painter of abstract and ethereal scenes. Andrew Butterfield says in a review of a recent showing of Raphael's drawings that this impression is due to our lack of direct exposure to Raphael's work. Looked at up close, Raphael's drawings reveal an artist obsessed…
J ane Austen has been in the news this week, what with the 200th anniversary of her death on July 18, 1817. To mark the day, the TLS republished a 1913 review of an Austen biography by Virginia Woolf. Woolf has some very insightful things to say about Austen, but…
A TLS review of two books of the Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy notes the hints of holiness in his novels: Often in his work . . . there are residual glimmers of the numinous. McCarthy, who was raised a Roman Catholic, is often read as an unconventional religious writer,…
I n his opening essay in Christian Dogmatics , co-editor Mike Allen quotes George Hunsinger's claim that Jurgen Moltmann, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and Eberhard Jungel are all guilty of historicizing eternity and subjecting it to eschatology. They all start from what Allen calls a “hard” or “ontological” interpretation of Rahner's Rule…
R esponding to a piece defending utilitarianism by one O. P. Q. in the Morning Chronicle, Coleridge writes : He is for the greatest possible happiness for the greatest possible number, and for the longest possible time! So am I; so are you, and every one of us, I will…
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