Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I live in an area where Mardi Gras is in full swing, and I can remember from my upbringing that Fat Tuesday was a last ditch effort at debauchery before the pseudo-spiritual practice of “giving something up for Lent” really began. In my youth I would give up some kind…
Part 1: Observations from the Texts (Matthew 9:14-17, Mark 2:18-22, Luke 5:33-39) The precipitating context for the new wine/old wineskins discussion is people asking Jesus why His disciples did not fast. His immediate answer is that you can’t get the friends of the groom to fast at the bachelor party…
Simply, “progress” means to move forward. In that sense, a slug can progress from one end of the sidewalk to the other. But for us in twenty-first century America, progress means something else. For us, it is almost a synonym for goodness. The slug can only “progress” if the other…
I have the privilege of being able to counsel a lot of women who are seeking abortions. I can tell you that the majority of them are seeking to end their pregnancies not because they feel like it would be a fun thing to do, but because they are scared…
Last night, along with a few online friends, I watched this debate on the meaning of life between William Lane Craig, Rebecca Goldstein, and Jordan Peterson, hosted by Wycliffe College. While watching it, and reflecting upon Peterson’s work more generally (about which I’ve written in the past ), I was…
I’m glad to have been invited to contribute regularly to the Theopolis Institute website. Thank you, readers, for welcoming and joining what I hope will be a venture of integration. Integration itself is what I want to explore. And for me personally, this is the shape of my current integrative…
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William Deresiewicz has an excellent review of a new biography of Joseph Conrad in the June 11 issue of TNR . One thread of the review has to do with Conrad’s phantasmagorical vision of European imperialism and his related concern for the moral dangers of isolation from well-known social habits…
In an effort to maintain his distinction of meaning and significance, interpretation and critical assessment, E. D. Hirsch examines Welleck’s treatment of Marvell’s phrase “vegetable love.” He notes that “Welleck could not even make his point unless he could distinguish between what ‘vegetable’ probably means as used in the text…
Tallis yet again: He argues that confusion of langue and parole : leads to “conflation of the idea of a world as a value or set of values within the system with the meaning of a word used on a particular occasion, that by virtue of which verbal meaning is…
Tallis thinks that one of the basic confusions of post-Saussurean criticism is a confusion of the levels of parole and langue . Signifiers and signifieds are, for Saussure, purely differential; but words are not signifiers or signifieds, but types of signs, which are combinations of the two. Signifier and signified…
Does language take cues from reality? Tallis says Yes; at least, that’s one kind of relation language has to reality. His charming evidence: He notes that it’s more common to add “barking” to “dog” than to add other verbs. If language doesn’t take its cues from reality, “we must surely…
Tallis contests the post-structuralist notion that all distinctions are linguistic, imported to reality by what we say about them. This, he thinks, oversimplifies a more complex situation. For some realities, the “edges” are determined by language, because those realities depend on classifications that we have brought to the real world.…
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