Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Optimism is “an inclination to put the most favorable construction upon actions and events or to anticipate the best possible outcome.” 1 On the other hand, pessimism is “an inclination to emphasize adverse aspects, conditions, and possibilities or to expect the worst possible outcome.” We can see that optimism and…
If we wish to understand the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, we must begin with seeing them as a part of the creational order. Trees, along with plants and seed-bearing things, come to life by the word of God as part of…
“I chant slips and irreversible disasters, wiltings, failures, scars, the little disappointments and the large, blue streaks down a world that wishes it was only suncolors.” Paul J. Pastor from Kintsugi Song I recently lost something very valuable. Something I’d had for years and used every day. But, it wasn’t…
In his eponymous book, Jonah follows an exodus pattern. He travels through the waves and east of the city into the wilderness. On a first reading, it looks like another use of this common literary shape in the Old Testament: salvation through the waters of death and the wilderness of…
“Everyone serves the good wine first, and when people have drunk freely, then the poor wine. But you have kept the good wine until now.” The unknowing master of ceremonies didn’t know how right he was. We see this play out in John’s apocalypse. The end is like the beginning,…
Read in isolation, The Test of Adultery (Num 5:11-31) presents the reader with a seemingly bizarre ritual, conjuring up ideas bordering on the Salem Witch Trials. Beyond this, pressing questions linger—such as, “Why is the woman in particular singled out, while no test is provided for the husband of a…
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When John first talks about sin, he connects it to fellowship and walking in the light. He does not say, “If we walk in the light, the blood of Jesus cleanses us, and as a result we have fellowship with one another.” He says, “If we walk in the light,…
Stallybrass and White critize Bakhtin for conceptualizing the fair purely as a place of communal celebration, ignoring the commercial activities of the fair: “In developing this concept, Bakhtin succumbs to that separation of the festive and the commercial which is distinctive of capitalist rationality as it emerged in the Renaissance.…
Stallybrass and White again: The classical form “was far more than an aesthetic standard or model.” It might be better to say that there was a classicist aesthetic at work in other areas besides art. In any case, the classical body “structured, from the inside as it were, the characteristically…
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White ( The Politics and Poetics of Transgression ) summarize a point from Bakhtin: “Bakhtin was struck by the compelling difference between the human body as represented in popular festivity and the body as represented in classical statuary in the Renaissance. He noticed how the two…
Theologians normally treat the incarnation-to-burial of Jesus as the humiliation of the Son; resurrection-to-ascension exaltation. That’s correct, but there are other angles too. God hid His face behind a veil from the time of Moses to the incarnation. This is His humiliation - we might almost say, a display of…
Andre Gide wrote: “Has anyone, in explaining Hamlet’s character, made full use of the fact that he has returned from a German university? He brings back to his native country the germs of a foreign philosophy; he has plunged int a metaphysics whose remarkable fruit seems to me ‘To be…
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