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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The exhortation for Sunday, September 14: Jesus knew that His teaching differed from the teaching of others in Israel and especially from the Pharisees, and His warnings at the end of the sermon show that He wanted to distinguish His teaching from others. He gives a quick succession of “cartoons”…
The life of Aldous Huxley is a parable of the modern age. Descended from Darwin’s bulldog Thomas Henry Huxley and Matthew Arnold, Huxley was part of an elite intellectual class of distinctly Victorian orientation. He was greatly offended by the “mass culture” that he saw developing around him, and wrote…
In Jesus’ “sermon on the plain” in Luke 6 there are a number of cool structures and numerological patterns. The whole sermon is divided into three large chunks, the Beatitudes (vv. 20-27), a section on love of enemies (vv. 27-38, which is marked out by the beginning phrase “But I…
Noemie Emery is one of the most interesting political writers today. She has a David Brooksish ability to display the inner connections between politics, personality, and culture, all with a sharp historical sensibility. She is not nearly so entertaining a writer as Brooks, but more profound. Consider this superb passage…
Neil Elliot, in the book mentioned in the previous post, says that “The conspirators who assassinated Caligula included an officer he had sexually humiliated, who stabbed the emperor repeatedly in the genitals.” I recall that Plutarch records something similar about Brutus’s strike against Julius Caesar. Does this suggest that striking…
In the midst of some typical and typically inane apology for sodomy, Neil Elliot (in Liberating Paul: The Justice of God and the Politics of the Apostle , Orbis, 1994) raises the interesting question of why Paul focuses on sexual immorality at the beginning of his letter to the Romans…
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