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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John Scott offers this rich interpretation of Inferno 19, where Dante comes across a collection of popes and other churchmen stuck upside-down in the rocks of Hell, their feet “licked” with fire: “Instead of turning their desires heavenward, these corrupt churchmen had sold the things of the Holy Spirit (just…
Why is it Virgil who leads Dante through Hell and as far as the top of Mount Purgatory? Well, he’s a poet for one thing, the greatest poet of all by Dante’s reckoning. Plus, for the medievals, he had taken on the role of sage and magus, and was widely…
Why did Naboth refuse to sell his vineyard to Ahab? Ray Dillard pointed to Leviticus 25 for the answer: “Because the land represented the fruit of the nation’s redemption, God commanded that it remain in the hands of the families to whom it was originally allotted. The land had been…
Why did Naboth refuse to sell his vineyard to Ahab? Ray Dillard pointed to Leviticus 25 for the answer: “Because the land represented the fruit of the nation’s redemption, God commanded that it remain in the hands of the families to whom it was originally allotted. The land had been…
INTRODUCTION Ahab?s sin begins in idolatry. But his sin is not a ?private?Esin, nor is it confined to a ?religious?Earea of life. In 1 Kings, as in all the prophets, idolatry always leads to social oppression and injustice. The sin of Ahab foreshadows the later oppressions of Manasseh and other…
Paul’s description of the church as the body of Christ parallels in both its basic conception and in its details the social theory of ancient moralists. Seneca, for instance, wrote, “What if the hands should desire to harm the feet, or the eyes the hands? As all the members of…
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