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Writing

Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.

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Soothing Pain is not Enough

In Infantilised: How Our Culture Killed Adulthood (2024), Keith Hayward says that we live in a “therapy culture.” This is “a way of thinking” about upbringing and education “when the values and language of counseling and psychotherapy break out from the clinical setting and take hold within the cultural imagination…

by Bogumil JarmulakJune 5, 2025
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Biblical Theology

Sarah, Abraham’s Helper

In Genesis 20:13, Abraham reveals that when he and his wife left their father’s house, he asked Sarah to call him her brother, not her husband. Abraham looked ahead to the land before them, a land full of violence, and he didn’t trust men there. He believed they would see…

by Donald LinnemeyerJune 3, 2025
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Biblical Studies

Why You Should Read the Biblical Languages

Introduction I am sitting in a rural village in the northern part of a West African country. I’m in the courtyard of an imam. Two other Christians are with me. It’s hot and dusty, but we have come to read Scripture and talk together. As a local Christian takes the…

by Calvin HaysMay 29, 2025
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On Merriment

This is the wey to al good aventure; Be glad, thou reder, and thy sorwe of-caste -Geoffrey Chaucer, The Parlement of Foulys, 131–132 In January I had the honor and delight of speaking at the Church of the Redeemer’s 2025 Christendom Lectures. What follows are drawn from the notes for…

by Mark BriansMay 27, 2025
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Galatians

The Letter: A Fictional Account of the Writing of Galatians

I had often heard that wisdom is visible in the countenance and I thought that I had seen examples of it in the past. But the man who stood before me, loosely holding the reins of the mare and peering around him with sharp interest, gave no outward hint of…

by Christian LeithartMay 22, 2025
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Revelation

Satan’s Final Throne Room Accusation

And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light — 1 Corinthians 11:14 In Revelation 5:2, the first of three “Mighty Angels” appears before the throne of God and preaches in a great voice, asking, “Who is worthy to open the book, and to loose the…

by Ryan SpencerMay 20, 2025

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Differentiation and De-Differentiation

In their editorial introduction to Globalizing the Sacred , Manual Vasquez and Marie Marquardt explain the limitations of secularization theory. Some secularization theorists, recognizing that the theory's universal claims have proven false, put forward a qualified secularization theory. Though secularization as such doesn't explain the progress of modernity, modernity does…

September 10, 2015

Film in a Fallen Eden

In a 2003 essay on Terrence Malick's film, Days of Heaven , Hubert Cohen traces the Edenic motifs in Malick's various films. At the beginning of The Thin Red Line , “Private Witt (Jim Caviezel) . . . is AWOL and living in a Melanesian community that he stubbornly insists…

September 9, 2015
Biblical Studies

On the Deaths of Sons

In a recent Theopolis lecture, James Jordan pointed to the symmetry between the beginning and end of the Mosaic era. As soon as the tabernacle is set up, Aaron's two sons, Nadab and Abihu, offer foreign fire before the Lord and are killed. At the end of the Mosaic era,…

September 9, 2015

Cut It Out

In a recent New Yorker piece on “ Omission ,” John McPhee puts in a word for concise writing. Inevitably, he quotes Hemingway: “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is…

September 9, 2015

Cinematic Song

Josh Timmermann suggests that Terrence Malick's To the Wonder takes its cues not from love stories but from love songs - one in particular, the Song of Songs: “Its narrative logic is specifically poetic. Its structure is built carefully upon a cadence of clear, beautiful rhymes and faint yet significant…

September 8, 2015

How Big Is Religious Liberty?

The Federal District court in the Kim Davis case concluded that requiring her to sign same-sex marriage licenses didn't violate her free exercise of religion. She still could do all those quaint things that religious people do: “Davis remains free to practice her Apostolic Christian beliefs. She may continue to…

September 8, 2015

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