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Writing

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

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Tyranny of the Agreeable

Inspired by the “Moscow Mood” Debate In a shocking 1961 study, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram would don an official-looking white lab coat and tell a volunteer to administer increasing shocks to another “volunteer” in an adjacent room strapped into an “electric chair” just out of sight. The shocks were incrementally…

by John CarpenterJuly 22, 2024
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Apostle Paul

Why Doesn’t Paul Quote Jesus?

My title and the substance of the article are borrowed from a section of David Wenham’s excellent book, Paul: Follower of Jesus or Founder of Christianity? I am appropriating ideas from the pages in his book which address the question, “Why Does Paul refer to Jesus’ Life and Ministry so…

by Ralph Allan SmithJuly 9, 2024
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James

The Epistle of James: Shotgun or Sniper

Some of us may be familiar with the notion that the epistle of James is like a New Testament version of Proverbs or other wisdom literature. According to this line of thinking, the epistle of James (together with the other wisdom literature) is basically a collection of timeless sayings without…

by Chris JohnsonJuly 4, 2024
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Virtue

Doing What You Don’t Want to Do

This summer I started walking a long trail that ran north from our home. On my best days, I would walk a total of five miles at a brisk pace. This trail follows the power lines that serve a significant portion of North Dallas and stretches far past the two…

by Mandi GerthJune 25, 2024
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American Culture

Is Queer Theology Christian?

I am an Australian. I went to the American Academy of Religion mega-fest last year to meet up with some friends, to present a paper at a ‘science and religion’ panel, and to marvel at the sheer scale of how Americans do things. It was quite a ride. Looking at…

by Paul TysonJune 18, 2024
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Ecclesiology

Consumerism, Oikos, and the Role of Women in the Church (Part 4)

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 We evangelicals do not often understand the roles of men and women in ministry. Because our consumerist culture has gutted the notion of family as it was historically understood, all Biblical passages about women in church ministry (a familial organism) are almost incomprehensible to…

by John CarpenterJune 11, 2024

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Philosophy

Hermeneutics v. Semiology

According to Michel Foucault, what Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud introduce is an age of interpretation. He develops one of the implications of this by suggesting there is a “fierce war” between semiology and hermeneutics, between treating words as signs and treating them as interpretations. Nietzsche in particular, Foucault claims, develops…

August 26, 2006
Literature

Shakespeare and Bible

Steven Marx’s Shakespeare and the Bible (Oxford, 2000), purports to be the “first book to explore the pattern and significance” of Shakespeare’s biblical allusions. Perhaps. The results are mixed. Each chapter of Marx’s book attempts to show structural, plot, and thematic parallels between a section of Scripture and a play…

August 26, 2006
Literature

Ubiquitous Shakespeare

Exploring Lake Superior in 1840, one Charles W Penny wrote, “We read the Bible I dare say much more than we would have done had we been in Detroit. Shakespeare was duly honoured, as he is every day when we travel. When on the water, some one of the party…

August 26, 2006

Divine Love

The Persons of the Trinity live out an eternal round of self-sacrificing love. If a proof text is needed, John 15 supplies it. 1) Jesus says, “as the Father loved Me, I have also loved you” (v. 9). Jesus’ love for the disciples is modeled on the Father’s for Him.…

August 26, 2006

Queen of the Sciences

John Stuart Mill declared at the beginning of his book on logic that “Logic is the common judge and arbiter of all particulars investigations. It does not undertake to find evidence, but to determine whether it has been found. Logic neither observes, nor invents, nor discovers; it judges.”

August 24, 2006
History

New

Hans Jonas writes in an essay on technological and scientific advance that one of the key cultural shifts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a, well, new understanding of “new,” and a corresponding revision of traditional ways of thinking about history: “A sign of this spreading mood is the…

August 24, 2006

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