Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The Failure of the Church Yet a third factor played an important role in this historical development, in addition to the imperial adoption of icons and the rise of the icons of the holy man. Brown writes: "The great Christian basilicas of the previous centuries tended to stand empty, except…
The three large patriarchal narratives of Genesis concern the three aspects of the cosmos: matter, space, and time. Over these three is man given dominion. Lucifer was originally appointed to train man in this dominion, but he chose to lead man into rebellion instead. Thus, the Angel of Yahweh replaced…
Part 6: Living in a Dying World (continued) The "Trivium" (continued) The five stages of education are simply the five stages of the covenant as God administers it in human life and history, and in the liturgy of covenant renewal: First, God announces Himself. "I am Yahweh Your God." He…
The following essay is tentative and exploratory, offered for your consideration. It seems to me that the ritual of the Ascension Offering (incorrectly translated as Burnt Offering) of Leviticus 1 is a symbolic recapitulation of Genesis 1, which thereby portrays the sacrificial ritual as way of moving from a fallen…
Just as the vast majority of evangelical Christians in America today are Arminian and Baptist, so the vast majority do not believe in a creation around 4000 BC. I don’t expect any of these three situations to change anytime soon. Powerful presuppositions are at work in all three instances, along…
The Iconoclastic Controversy Continuing Pagan Influence How did images creep in? To begin with, there was in the post-Constantinian Church a concerted effort on the part of the semi-pagans to interpret Christianity in essentially pantheistic terms. The heretics put God and man on a continuum of "being," so that God…
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Z ygmunt Bauman thinks we are awash in nostalgia. We have created a Retrotopia . Nostalgia, he argues, “is but one member of the rather extended family of affectionate relationship with an ‘elsewhere.'” Thus retrotopia shares characteristics with utopian inspirations and progressive projects, the main difference being that the Angel…
“T here's a new ‘sacred' in town,” write Juan and Stacey Floyd-Thomas in The Altars Where We Worship . It's not the old sacred of church, word, sacrament. They write, “Statistics reveal a startling gap between confession and practice in American religion. Slightly more than 70 percent of Americans in…
P atrick Deneen ( Democratic Faith , xiv) tells the story of the desacralization of the Cathedral of Saint Genevieve in 1791. The national assembly decided to “rededicate the basilica as a resting place for France’s revolutionary heroes. Above its doors were carved the words, ‘Aux grands hommes la Patrie…
I n his Aesthetics of Architecture , Roger Scruton summarizes RG Collingwood's distinction between art and craft. It has a surface plausibility: “Initially it seems quite reasonable to distinguish the attitude of the craftsman—who aims at a certain result and does what he can to achieve it—from that of the…
I n his book, Disenchanted Night , Wolfgang Schivelbusch considers the difference between lighting by torches and lighting with candles. With the torch, “the site of combustion and the fuel are one and the same thing, while in the candle they are clearly separated. From now on the wick acts…
H esiod's “Hymn to Hekate” seems to interrupt the Theogony to no good purpose. Hekate isn't a major goddess, and the hymn doesn't seem to be integrated into the rest of the poem. In her forthcoming bilingual edition of Hesiod's poems, Kimberly Johnson argues that “Hekate is integral to the…
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