Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Optimism is “an inclination to put the most favorable construction upon actions and events or to anticipate the best possible outcome.” 1 On the other hand, pessimism is “an inclination to emphasize adverse aspects, conditions, and possibilities or to expect the worst possible outcome.” We can see that optimism and…
If we wish to understand the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, we must begin with seeing them as a part of the creational order. Trees, along with plants and seed-bearing things, come to life by the word of God as part of…
“I chant slips and irreversible disasters, wiltings, failures, scars, the little disappointments and the large, blue streaks down a world that wishes it was only suncolors.” Paul J. Pastor from Kintsugi Song I recently lost something very valuable. Something I’d had for years and used every day. But, it wasn’t…
In his eponymous book, Jonah follows an exodus pattern. He travels through the waves and east of the city into the wilderness. On a first reading, it looks like another use of this common literary shape in the Old Testament: salvation through the waters of death and the wilderness of…
“Everyone serves the good wine first, and when people have drunk freely, then the poor wine. But you have kept the good wine until now.” The unknowing master of ceremonies didn’t know how right he was. We see this play out in John’s apocalypse. The end is like the beginning,…
Read in isolation, The Test of Adultery (Num 5:11-31) presents the reader with a seemingly bizarre ritual, conjuring up ideas bordering on the Salem Witch Trials. Beyond this, pressing questions linger—such as, “Why is the woman in particular singled out, while no test is provided for the husband of a…
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According to the Muslim commentator Ibn Abbas, “after the fall, Adam and Eve fasted for forty days and Adam abstained from having sex with Eve for a hundred years.”
George Williamson argues in Longing for Myth in Germany (Chicago, 2004) that the search for a “new mythology” developed from “the postrevolutionary experience of historical rupture and religious crisis.” Nationalist writers gave a particular spin to this by calling for a “German mythology.” Originally, in the early German romantics, the…
It is widely argued today that the early German romantic movement anticipates postmodernism; the early romantics were postmoderns before their time. Frederick Beiser differs, and notes three critical differences between German romanticism and the mainstream of postmodern philosophy. First, the early romantics were Platonists “in their belief in a single…
German idealism is often seen as the completion of the subjectivization of knowledge and reality begun by Descartes. Not so, says Frederick Beiser in his massive 2002 history of German idealism (Harvard): “In fundamental respects it is more accurate to say the exact opposite: that the development of German idealism…
Jean-Luc Marion challenges the Cartesian cogito by stressing the primacy of the erotic. According to Descartes’s formula ( Ego sum res cogitans ), “it follows by omission that I am no longer supposed to love, nor to hate; or better: I am of such a sort that I have neither…
Barth argues that 18th-century rational theology was rooted in prior commitments to peaceable citizenship and morality. The dynamic goes something like this: Christianity is interpreted pragmatically - it’s about the transformation of human life; but it doesn’t work - human life isn’t transformed; there must therefore be something wrong with…
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