Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
“What’s the fastest route” he asks me as we quickly come to a stop behind a sea of red brake lights. I pull out my phone and map all the options. Every way is red with traffic backed up. Deep down I must be a small town girl because traffic…
Dear Friend of Theopolis, I have signed a stack of documents in the years since we started Theopolis, but my heart jumped a few beats as I looked at the thick lease contract. “This is real,” I thought. “This makes it really real.” Theopolis has been real for nearly three…
In the Edenic world of Perelandra, from C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, Ransom notices something about how the Green Lady treats the animals: [1] “There was in her face an authority, in her caresses a condescension, [2] which by taking seriously the inferiority of her adorers made them somehow less inferior…
In my previous two articles, I argued for the significance of the fact that baptism addresses our bodies in their objectivity. In the body, the self has an existence that runs deeper than our consciousness, decision, self-expression, and action. In washing our passive bodies, baptism seals us with an anticipatory…
Judah is a sinful nation, weighed down with iniquity. They are not the seed of Abraham, but the seed of iniquity. Their worship is abominable to Yahweh, because their hands are covered with innocent blood. They have not done good, or sought justice, or reproved the ruthless, or defended the…
Although we tend to define ourselves by our subjectivity —our perceptions, thoughts, feelings, decisions, actions—we are frequently forgetful of the objectivity of the self as body, the reality of the self that underlies and precedes all of our subjectivity. The body is the site of our ‘givenness’, where we are…
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In his book on the hermeticist Hegel, Magee gives this helpful sketch of the differences between gnosticism and hermeticism: “Gnosticism and Hermeticism both believe that a divine ‘spark’ is implanted in man, and that man can come to know God. However, Gnosticism involves an absolutely negative account of creation. It…
In a 2001 book (Cornell), Glenn Magee argues that Hegel must be understood as a hermetic thinker. Hegel claims to have moved beyond the ancient notion of philosophy as “pursuit of wisdom” to an absolute knowledge that is simply identical with wisdom. As Magee says, “Hegel’s claim to have attained…
In After Virtue , Alasdair MacIntyre provides a neat discussion of the virtue and selfhood in Greek antiquity. The unity of ARETE, virtue, “resides . . . in the concept of that which enables a man to discharge his role,” and refers to “excellence of any kind,” whether in a…
One Marc Cohen of the University of Washington, offers this account of the “logos” of Heraclitus in an online lecture outline: First, “There is an orderly, law-governed process of change in the universe. (Compare fragment 80 with Anaximander, who equates strife with injustice; for Heraclitus, strife is justice, and is…
Some selections from Diogenes Laertius’ “Life of Heraclitus, from his “Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers: “He was above all men of a lofty and arrogant spirit, as is plain from his writings, in which he says, ‘Abundant learning does not form the mind; for if it did, it would…
Seigel devotes a fascinating section of his book ( Idea of the Self ) to a summary of Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees , in which Mandeville describes what Kant characterized as the “asocial sociability” of human nature. Social in the sense that even in a natural state, prior to…
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