Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
What happens at the Table of the Lord? If Christ is really present, then how is this so? The witness of the Church throughout history has been that Christ is present in the Eucharist through the operation of the Holy Spirit, and in the practice of the Church, prayers at…
In the power of the Spirit, the gospel forms a society in which there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, a society that is characterized by unity, long-suffering, patience; love. The gospel forms a culture whose participants do not steal but labor and give, who are not angry…
At the 1997 Biblical Horizons Summer Conference, the Rev. Jeffrey Meyers presented a series of remarkable lectures on the gospel of Mark. Among his many insightful comments, he suggested that the second gospel continues where the first gospel ends; Matthew ends with Jesus saying "Go" (Matthew 28:19), and Mark’s shows…
On October 25 at Avondale Brewery , Theopolis will be co-sponsoring the 2nd Annual Birmingham Life and Culture Series. This year's event will feature author Joseph Bottum. Joseph is known for his writings on literary criticism, religion, and his short stories. Essayist and reviewer Mary Eberstadt has said that "his…
One of the curiosities of the New Testament revelation is its focus on Galilee. The region of Galilee was given to Asher, Zebulun, Naphtali, and Issachar, and the events of Judges 4-8 occurred there, so it had some importance in Israelite history. But when the tribe of Ephraim led the…
In a recent post , Ian Paul discusses the practice of allegorical interpretation, reflecting in particular upon a conversation he had with someone concerning the reading of the story of Rahab. Paul’s interlocutor argued strongly for an allegorical reading of the Rahab story, writing: “Joshua is a type of Christ…
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The premise of Bonaventure’s “reduction of arts to theology” is that all knowledge, skill, perception is about light. Good and perfect gifts come down from the Father of Lights, James says, and Bonaventure sees that light refracted into four types of light. Some are obvious: the inner light of reason…
God alone, Augustine says, can act directly on souls. We cannot, but that doesn’t mean we can’t act on other souls. In Augustine’s anthropology, this is done through the body, by “signals conveyed by the physical body.” Such physical signs might be gestures, facial expressions, or “conventional indications such as…
Augustine, of course, says that pride is the beginning of revolt and sin. A prideful soul is one that refuses to recognize that “the whole quality of the soul’s existence is from God” and therefore that it is “enlivened in mental activity and in self-consciousness by God’s presence.” God, Augustine…
In his early treatise de musica , Augustine arranges everything into a hierarchy: God and other immutable objects above; human souls between; bodies and other carnal things below. It’s a Neoplatonic and hardly Christian notion. But embedded within that Augustine gets at something more sound. “Delight or enjoyment sets the…
Washington, Augustus on a prancing horse, sword pointing toward sunset. Over the pond, fringed with ice, droop the weeping willows. And what I miss most in the pine-blanketed West: leafless trees in cold sunshine.
In expounding on the coherence of Trinitarian theology with contemporary physics, Polkinghorne notes htat “it is striking that so methodologically reductionist a subject as physics has pointed us in this relational and holistic direction. This tendency is surely reinforced by chaos theory’s discovery that at the macroscopic level of physical…
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