Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Jonah is Paul’s typological opposite. Indeed, in the whole Old Testament, it would be difficult to find a more perfect foil to Paul than Jonah. Whereas Paul crosses the sea to enact God’s saving purposes for the Gentiles, Jonah crosses the sea to avoid bringing Gentiles God’s mercy. For that…
Years ago, I realized that if my children wanted to feel like their house was a home, I needed to be intentional about making our physical shelter a place of spiritual refuge. I began to see the Holy Spirit as the indwelling person of the Trinity—the one who makes His…
When the crowds encircle Christ in Solomon’s Porch during the Festival of Dedication, they charge him: “tell us boldly who you are!” 1 They do not draw-up to him to with excited anticipation as they did earlier in the Gospel, 2 instead they flank him like a gang of wolves.…
1 In Deuteronomy 7:1-5, Moses wrote: When Yahweh your God brings you into the land which you go to possess, and has cast out many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations…
Every Advent witnesses the gruesome reanimation of the voice that whispers “you know , Christmas is just a pagan holiday…” with that sort of conversational ellipsis that does not so much invite further reflection but halts and forecloses it. The claims are several and equally spurious: Jesus wasn’t born on…
Abraham's life in Genesis is a series of trials. He travels hundreds of miles from his family into a new land, flees from a famine into the hands of a king who takes his wife, and after returning, has to rescue his brother from a war. He's involved with two…
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Modernity, especially as theorized in modern economics, treats work as "instrumental to the acquisition of goods" (Stephen Marglin, The Dismal Science , 44). Modernity "closes off thinking of hard work as something other than drudgery" (43). As a counterpoint, Marglin calls attention to work in Amish communities: "In physical terms,…
"The Father is greater than I," says Jesus (John 14:28). Eunomius uses this to prove the ontological interiority of the Son. Basil of Caesarea rejects that reading, of course. But his way of rejecting it is worth attending to. He doesn't claim that Jesus is talking about His inferiority as…
Ian Hunter argues that "secularization" as "transition from divine reverencing to rational autonomy" didn't happen during the centuries after Reformation. Confessional Christianity didn't disappear but was more deeply entrenched during that time. "Secular" referred not to the imposition or incursion of rational atheism but to the formation of purely political…
Is God simple? Christian theologians from the Cappadocians to Aquinas and beyond said Yes. But we need to probe this consensus: Did they mean the same thing by saying Yes? Andrew Radde-Gallwitz says No ( Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and the Transformation of Divine Simplicity ). What is…
In a debunking paper on "secularization" and the "secular," Ian Hunter argues that "nobody in early modernity spoke of secularization in terms of a transition from divine reverencing to rational autonomy, but also that there is no evidence of such a transition taking place there and, further, that there is…
Richard Spady's eye-opening piece in First Things examines the consequences that follow when economics becomes an ideology, that is, when economics "willfully projects its own first principles on its subject matter and actively seeks, perhaps unconsciously, material changes to bring social realities into conformity with these first principles." He offers…
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