Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
“What’s the fastest route” he asks me as we quickly come to a stop behind a sea of red brake lights. I pull out my phone and map all the options. Every way is red with traffic backed up. Deep down I must be a small town girl because traffic…
Dear Friend of Theopolis, I have signed a stack of documents in the years since we started Theopolis, but my heart jumped a few beats as I looked at the thick lease contract. “This is real,” I thought. “This makes it really real.” Theopolis has been real for nearly three…
In the Edenic world of Perelandra, from C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, Ransom notices something about how the Green Lady treats the animals: [1] “There was in her face an authority, in her caresses a condescension, [2] which by taking seriously the inferiority of her adorers made them somehow less inferior…
In my previous two articles, I argued for the significance of the fact that baptism addresses our bodies in their objectivity. In the body, the self has an existence that runs deeper than our consciousness, decision, self-expression, and action. In washing our passive bodies, baptism seals us with an anticipatory…
Judah is a sinful nation, weighed down with iniquity. They are not the seed of Abraham, but the seed of iniquity. Their worship is abominable to Yahweh, because their hands are covered with innocent blood. They have not done good, or sought justice, or reproved the ruthless, or defended the…
Although we tend to define ourselves by our subjectivity —our perceptions, thoughts, feelings, decisions, actions—we are frequently forgetful of the objectivity of the self as body, the reality of the self that underlies and precedes all of our subjectivity. The body is the site of our ‘givenness’, where we are…
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M arjorie Garber ( Shakespeare After All , 300–2) nicely captures the Pauline resonances of the trial scene in Merchant of Venice : “Shylock will provide a scale to weigh the pound of flesh, but not a surgeon to staunch the wound. He will, that is, provide the emblem of…
I n a 1911 article on “The Ant Colony as Organism,” William Morton Wheeler argued that an ant colony was not only organism-like but an actual organism: “Like a cell or the person, it behaves as a unitary whole, maintaining its identity in space, resisting dissolution...neither a thing nor a…
I an Boxall gets a lot right in his commentary on Revelation 6:9–11 (in his excellent The Revelation of Saint John , 113). He knows that the blood of a purification offering is poured out at the base of the altar, the very position where the souls of the martyrs…
W riting in 1888, J. Theodore Bent described a visit to Patmos, during which he read the Apocalypse. One day, he recounted, “I stood by the sea looking south-west, I distinctly saw Thera, as it was anciently called, rising out of the sea. This island is now also called Thera…
Bede ( Latin Commentaries on Revelation , 133-5) interprets the list of Israel's tribes in Revelation 7 by etymologizing the names. The list forms a sequence, from Judah to Benjamin. Judah means “confession or praise” and is placed first because “before the beginning of confession, no one attains the heights…
V iolent malice can be directed against God, the self, and the neighbor, Virgil tells Dante ( Inferno 11) as they huddle under the lid of one of the tombs in the sixth circle of hell. Virgil takes a moment to explain the moral theology that organizes hell. He explicates…
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