Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
[This essay was originally published in 1988. Given the situation that our new national socialists are getting the world into, I thought it might be useful to reprint it here. – JBJordan] The Bible has quite a bit to say about gold, silver, and precious stones, and the Bible always…
I wrote this elsewhere and was encouraged to put it here. It is a comment on what a pastor is. Today, this is not very well understood, and God’s people suffer because of it. There are four professions: medicine, education, law, and religion. Each of these, when done at a…
James Jordan recently pointed out in private conversation how appropriate it is, in John’s Gospel, that Nicodemus is present both to ask Jesus about being born again, and to see Jesus re-enter the womb of the mother. Nicodemus rhetorically asks, “How can a man be born when he is old?…
This is a problematic and much discussed passage. I’ve been discussing it in another forum, and have decided to move it here and present some very preliminary observations about it. One large question is this: Who is the speaker here and what is his situation? Traditionally, the speaker is seen…
1. The current issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction includes a good fantasy novella by John C. Wright, who since his conversion has been writing Christianly. This is a fine fantasy with nods to C. S. Lewis and Antoine de Saint-Exupery, and probably Gene Wolfe as well.…
“It is an experience of our days that the spoken name of Jesus alone exercises an unforeseen power; and the effort which it cost to speak this name is perhaps connected to some faint apprehension of the power which is inherent within it. Wherever the name of Jesus Christ is…
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A thought on the coverage of the Pope’s funeral: When was the last time you saw so many old men on TV?
At one point in Atonement, Briony sends a slightly fictionalized version of part of her story to a magazine. She writes in the style of Virginia Woolf, focusing on light plays on the surfaces of stone and water. The story is rejected, and in explaining the rejection the editor says…
With Ian McEwan’s recent Saturday getting strong reviews everywhere, I decided I needed to read the only McEwan novel that I possess, the 2001 Atonement . Atonement focuses on the story of the Tallis family. On a sultry day in Surrey in the 1930s, through a series of petty conflicts…
From Luther’s Freedom of a Christian : “as our heavenly Father has in Christ freely come to our aid, we also ought freely to help our neighbor through our body and its works, and each one should become as it were a Christ to the other that we may be…
The allusions to Exodus early in Matthew fit into a larger theological and literary thrust of the first gospel. Commentators have often noted that the gospel is organized around five large discourses, some of which are virtually monologues: The sermon on the Mount (chs. 5-7); Jesus?Emission instructions to His disciples…
A discarded fragment from a paper: Virtually any passage of Eliot, even the briefest, would serve for hours of source-checking. Let me offer a brief interpretation of the closing lines of Part I of The Waste Land. The whole section is entitled ‘The Burial of the Dead.’ The final section,…
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