Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Jonah is Paul’s typological opposite. Indeed, in the whole Old Testament, it would be difficult to find a more perfect foil to Paul than Jonah. Whereas Paul crosses the sea to enact God’s saving purposes for the Gentiles, Jonah crosses the sea to avoid bringing Gentiles God’s mercy. For that…
Years ago, I realized that if my children wanted to feel like their house was a home, I needed to be intentional about making our physical shelter a place of spiritual refuge. I began to see the Holy Spirit as the indwelling person of the Trinity—the one who makes His…
When the crowds encircle Christ in Solomon’s Porch during the Festival of Dedication, they charge him: “tell us boldly who you are!” 1 They do not draw-up to him to with excited anticipation as they did earlier in the Gospel, 2 instead they flank him like a gang of wolves.…
1 In Deuteronomy 7:1-5, Moses wrote: When Yahweh your God brings you into the land which you go to possess, and has cast out many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations…
Every Advent witnesses the gruesome reanimation of the voice that whispers “you know , Christmas is just a pagan holiday…” with that sort of conversational ellipsis that does not so much invite further reflection but halts and forecloses it. The claims are several and equally spurious: Jesus wasn’t born on…
Abraham's life in Genesis is a series of trials. He travels hundreds of miles from his family into a new land, flees from a famine into the hands of a king who takes his wife, and after returning, has to rescue his brother from a war. He's involved with two…
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According to Fergus Kerr, it was Bonaventure, not Thomas, who first employed the axiom “grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it,” in his commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences.
Markus wants to distinguish between the fact that people who act in the public realm always act with ultimate ends in view, and that their actions are either moral or immoral from the notion that there is a neutral public space. The public sphere, he claims, shouldn’t be thought of…
RA Markus (Christianity and the Secular) argues that as the church celebrated the triumph of Christianity in the fourth century, they also wanted to maintain their continuity with the church that gave them birth - the persecuted church of the martyrs: “The great need felt by Christians of the post-Constantinian…
Charles Taylor has suggested that secularism was an “exit strategy” from religious conflict. There were two exit strategies. In the summary by RA Markus, “The first, ‘the common ground strategy,’ assumes a certain range of beliefs shared by all Christians (or all theists) and minimises or eliminates confessional differences that…
John Locke drew up the basic contours of the modern conception of religion as internal and private in his “Letter Concerning Toleration.” He made a sharp distinction between religious and civil realms: “The end of a religious society, as has already been said, is the public worship of God, and,…
Comments primarily on Aquinas on Gratitude/Ingratitude (primarily ST, II-II, qs 106-7). Aquinas describes gratitude as a virtue “annexed” to justice, and so to understand his discussion of gratitude, we must get some handle on what he means by justice. In ST II-II, q. 58, he describes justice as a virtue.…
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