Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Every advent of new media creates the justifiable reaction from some that the necessarily accompanied amputation may not be worth the extension made possible by the new tools. This is not unique to the Digital Age. Lamoignon Malesherbes, the French politician who was counsel for the defense of Louis XVI,…
A response to Gage Crowder's " The Hole in our Hope ?" Already, the first pages of the Bible promise a bright future. The story starts with the creation of heaven and earth, where heaven is perfect, but the earth is in a state of formless emptiness. Yet, God takes…
A rejoinder to Bubu Jarmulak's essay, " Embrace Pessimism ." Whereas calumnious critiques are reflections of more on the critic than the work criticized, good critiques are always opportunities for reassessment and improvement if they are received as such . Since its renaissance, the biblical doctrine of postmillennialism—or “optimistic eschatology,”…
Several decades ago, a pastor (and friend) mentioned in passing at one of our regular breakfasts together that he wasn’t satisfied with the usual reading of Jesus’s prayer in Gethsemane, the usual reading being that Jesus asked the Father to avoid the Cross at Gethsemane. We turned to the passage,…
On May 21, 1604, the cathedral of Toledo in Spain held job interviews for the post of choirmaster, the head of music at the church. The position had been vacated when the previous occupant, Alonso Lobo, was poached by the nearby cathedral of Seville, and Toledo needed a replacement who…
Imagine — counterfactually: on the night he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus held up an empty hand and said, ‘This is the blood of the covenant poured out for you. Drink of it.’ But there was no cup, no wine, nothing. If there’s no sign of the covenant, is there…
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Rowan Williams concludes a brief summary of the patristic debates about the double/single will of Jesus by saying “we are encouraged to see Jesus as fully aware of the general possibilities of human nature, including the possibilities of betrayal, cowardice, and self-gratification, aware of those as part of his composition…
For many Christians, sacraments are locked in a winner-take-all battle with faith. Are we reconciled to God by faith or by baptism? Do we feed on Christ by believing or by eating bread and drinking wine? When we place too much emphasis on sacraments, many believe, we run the risk…
Peter King begins his Private Dwelling by posing what he describes as simple, silly, obvious questions about housing: What is its use? Who needs it? What is housing for? Early on, he points to the “iconography” implied by our language about housing: “There is an iconography attached to housing that…
Charles Taylor's The Language Animal is a defense of HHH against HLC. That is, he thinks the linguistic perspective developed by Hamann, Herder, and Humboldt is superior to the rationalist and empiricist tradition of Hobbes, Locke, and Condillac. HLC “tried to understand language within the confines of the modern representational…
Monks fled. They did not flee from community or contact with others. They fled in order to become more deeply engaged with others in a more radical form of community. Rowan Williams writes ( Silence and Honey Cakes ), “What is learned in the desert is clearly not some individual…
Walter Benjamin had no totalizing philosophical system. He was an essayist, admits Ranier Rochlitz ( The Disenchantment of Art ). Rochlitz doesn't use the term to demean, however. Benjamin “is not an essayist in the manner of Montaigne; the scientific imperative is not lacking in his essays. He conducts concrete…
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