Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
“13th of July, 4:50 pm. I'm sorry. I know that means little at this point, but I am. I tried, I think you would all agree that I tried. To be true, to be strong, to be kind, to love, to be right. But I wasn't. And I know you…
CS Lewis's 1948 essay on “Priestesses in the Church” strikes a reader today as simultaneously quaintly naive and trenchantly prescient. The naive part comes near the beginning, where Lewis describes the decision to take “a revolutionary step.” It would “cut ourselves off from the Christian past and to widen the…
Imagine a version of the Lord of the Rings beginning with Sauron riding into the Shire and lopping off heads in a mad search for the ring, driving Frodo to flight from the beginning, helter-skelter and harried. While, no doubt, some Hollywood exec is at this moment scrambling to reboot…
A Communist Confession of Faith states that the aim of the Communists is “to organize society in such a way that every member of it can develop and use all his capabilities and powers in complete freedom and without thereby infringing the basic conditions of this society.” This aim can…
The story of the Fall enjoys a peculiar place in Christian thought. Together with the creation account in the two chapters that precede it, it is one of the few Old Testament narratives consistently to escape the relative neglect the Hebrew Scriptures often suffer. While the characters of Abraham, Moses,…
In the previous essay, we saw that fire is a work of the Holy Spirit. The two are related so closely that they cannot be separated. Now we turn our attention to the Spirit's relationship to water. Many have understood Spirit baptism to be a dry baptism, one that is…
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Todd Gitlin says we’re not, or we are in only specific ways. George Eliot complained already in 1859 that “Leisure is gone . . . even idleness is eager now,” and Nietzsche said that “Virtue has come to consist of doing something in less time than someone else.” Actual physical…
Between 1948 and 1951, Sayyid Qutb was in the US, and his reflections on this experience, published as Signposts , has been called the “key text of the jihadist movement.” One of the things that particularly frightened Qutb was the freedom of American women, and the comparatively casual relations between…
Of the antiquarians of his day, John Donne wrote: If in his study he hath so much care To hang all old strange things, Let his wife beware.
Hebrews says that with a change of priesthood there is also a change of law, and these two are the main features of covenantal shifts. In context, “law” has specific reference to the rules of qualifications for priests. One might generalize: Fundamental cultural changes are changes in priesthood and changes…
In his book, The Last Days of the Renaissance , Theodore Rabb notes that one sign of the fragility of the late medieval church was its inability to continue to absorb fresh movements. This was not relativism; there was recognizable unity throughout the church. Yet, there was also remarkable diversity:…
A book on the uses of the biblical story of Josiah would make a fascinating cultural history. The Reformers found inspiration for iconoclasm in Josiah. Bacon described his program as “instauration,” borrowing the Vulgate’s term for the renovation of the temple. Or, more broadly, the role of Solomon’s Temple in…
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