Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I grew up in the 1950s. This was before the "Sixties" and the democratization, informalization, and general cheapening of the church and her worship. Ministers were Father Donovan, Pastor Eckhart, Reverend MacPherson, Mister (Episcopal) Parker, and Brother Smith. Liturgical speech was high language, sounding kind of like the King James…
Metaphor exerts a surprisingly powerful influence within our thinking. Although it is easily dismissed as little more than a figure of speech, when we attend more closely to the ways in which we use it, metaphor’s importance swiftly becomes more apparent. Although many of our metaphors have become quite invisible…
What is a tree, scientifically speaking? A mere googling gives the following answer: “a woody perennial plant, typically having a single stem or trunk growing to a considerable height and bearing lateral branches at some distance from the ground.” We can increase detail by describing its family, genus, species and…
The majority of Western evangelical Christians rarely, if ever, fast as a form of spiritual discipline. In our culture, fasting is more connected with dieting than worship, the other side of our deeply ambiguous fascination with food. Food is everywhere. We eat more than ever before, at greater speed, and…
A Grammar of Creation An understanding of the visual-musical language of the Bible must begin with Genesis 1. This is fortunate, because when explaining biblical types to academics, as opposed to children, one is repeatedly forced to start from scratch. From birth, a healthy child is attuned to rhythm and…
In an inverse Eden, a land laid waste, one works alone tending the trash. There are none like him in all the earth, inquisitive, playful and most drawn to those mysterious, dancing bipedal creatures who lost earth and left it to go wandering the vast wilderness of space. Humans have…
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Luke 13 begins with a discussion of guilt and disasters. Pilate had slaughtered Galileans in the temple, mingling their blood with the blood of their sacrifices. Jesus denies that the Galileans who perished were greater sinners than others. Rather, “unless you repent, you shall also likewise perish.” NT Wright takes…
Many years ago, I critiqued traditional sacramental theology for overusing the zoom lens. Many debates and many theological formulations focus on the metaphysics of the bread and wine, and ignore other critical features of the Eucharistic event - the gathered church, eating and drinking, the specific type of food and…
In his forthcoming Wondrous Truths , JD Trout offers an alternative account of the rise of modern science. It's not the result of Christian views of the cosmos, nor of the dogged application of scientific method. It is the product of superior theory. And Western science has superior theory largely…
David Gelernter claims that Trump has identified the elephant plopped on our national coffee table - political correctness. He doesn't think the label is very descriptive, preferring to call it “invasive leftism or thought-police liberalism or metastasized progressivism.” It is, he says, “the biggest issue facing America today.” Its attitude…
Know thyself, someone said. Oh, right, answered the skeptic. “Knowing ourselves - what we are like, how we came to be this way, how we might be, and too, how we should be - is extraordinarily difficult because we are such complex and confusing creatures,” writes Terrence Martin in his…
Reflecting on the lessons of Donald Trump in a piece at Public Discourse , Matthew Wright points to The Speechwriter , a recent book by Barton Swaim, former speechwriter to South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford. Wright summarizes, “Armed with a Ph.D. in English from Edinburgh, Swaim took up speechwriting with…
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