Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I believe hymnals should be shorter than they are. Much shorter. 100 hymns at most, let’s say. I imagine that this will be a hard one to swallow for most of my readers, so I will attempt to bolster my argument as best I can. I can’t think of any…
Joshua is never called a king in the Bible. Yet while lacking the title, Joshua possesses the trappings of biblical kingship to a degree that it seems warranted to consider him a royal figure. There are lots of reasons for thinking this. In a 1981 Journal of Biblical Literature article,…
God speaks. He is not silent. He has designed humanity for reception of such communication and also to speak on His behalf. This speaking is not simply happenstance. It is not just a curious quirk about humanity. It is intrinsic to who we are that we speak and shape the…
One evening, years ago, home from college for Christmas break, I dreamt that I was playing the piano, passionately and well, in the church sanctuary beneath the parsonage in the renovated mansion in rural New Hampshire where my father was the minister. It was something of a lucid dream because…
I’m a big worrier. Always have been. Some of my earliest memories are of being anxious to the point of getting sick, sometimes for trivial reasons. My mind moves a million miles a minute, wondering what will happen in 5 minutes, or tomorrow, or next week, or in ten years.…
“The sun had gone up on the earth when Lot came to Zoar. And the LORD rained on Sodom and on Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the LORD from heaven, and he devastated those cities and the whole valley and all those dwelling in the cities and the growth of…
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Augustine describes “pride of life” in part as follows: “The temptation is to wish to be feared or loved by people for no reason other than the joy derived from such power, which is no joy at all. It is a wretched life, and vanity is repulsive . . .…
1 John 2:15: If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. As we’ve seen this morning, John poses a stark either/or choice. Our lives are directed by our loves; what we love determines what path we take in life. Ultimately, there are only two…
John says, “Do not love the world or the things in the world,” and we immediately scurry around to find rationalizations and escape routes. Is John saying that cigarettes and beer and symphony orchestras and dancing and watching movies and art museums and playing video games are inherently sinful? Didn’t…
Stallybrass and White again: “increasingly from the sixteenth century pigs were present and high visible in the city . They wandered through the streets, sometimes biting and even killing small children: in 1608 the young Sir Hugh Cholmley was attacked by a sow. A Jacobean starchmaker kept 200 pigs in…
After a survey of the exotica on display in fairs in the 18th-19th centuries, Stallybrass and White conclude that the fairs do not, as Bakhtin argued, enact a grotesque inversion of civilized hierarchies, but instead reinforce those very hierarchies. Two passages are particularly important: “One could even mount the precise…
English fairs in earlier centuries displayed wares and displays from all over the world. At one there was an animal described as “a noble creature, which much resembled a Wild Hairy man” whose main skill was to doff his hat and show “his respects to the Company, and smoaks a…
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