Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I am making a new rule in our house! We are actually kind of skimpy on the house rules. I try very hard to keep things simple: love God, love others, be joyful. It’s not complicated to avoid discipline here. But I have found myself repeating this new rule over…
Click HERE for Part 2 The voice of Jesus transforms and changes Mary when she hears him speak her name. This is her last “turning.” So also the woman in the Song of Songs longs to hear the voice of her beloved. Let me see your face, let me hear…
Click HERE for Part 1. The details of this story call the attentive reader back to the drama of Solomon’s Song of Songs. And the Song of Song’s alludes to, ties us into the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden and the promise of a coming Messiah that…
“The course was a paradigm shift for me,” said Jonathan Sedlak, a Milwaukee electrical contractor who attended Theopolis’s course on Revelation. “I am left with a book that is far more practical than it has ever seemed before.” Jonathan Anderson of Louisville, Kentucky found the course “refreshing.” “I finished with…
“It is only by participation in a rational, practice-based community that one becomes rational.” – Alasdair MacIntyre It may be perfectly clear to a chef why adding unsifted powdered sugar to a hot frosting is a bad idea. But for an amateur cook, this may be the kind of rule…
On a fresco in a chapel in Padua, Italy, there is a famous painting depicting the dramatic post-resurrection scene in John 20 with Mary and Jesus outside of the garden tomb. Giotto di Bondone painted it in the early 14th century. Jesus is striding from the tomb with a victor’s…
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J ohn van Engen argues in a 1986 article that the romanticized “legend of the Christian Middle Ages” doesn't hold up to historical scrutiny. Until the Reformation and counter-Reformation, Europe was only superficially Christianized, full of paganism and quasi-pagan “residuals” from pre-Christian cultures. Besides, the vision of a unified, deeply…
A ccording to many biologists and philosophers of science, evolution has eliminated all notion of purpose, teleology, and form from biology. Living things are machines that operate by chemical and physical processes, guided by the purposeless process of natural selection. Stephen Talbott begs to differ , at length and devastatingly.…
C hristopher Carroll reviews two volumes of music criticism written by Virgil Thomson at the NYRB . Carroll characterizes Thomson as a “knight errant” because of principles like this one, enunciated in his book, The State of Music : To expose the philanthropic persons in control of our musical institutions…
E amon Duffy tells the fascinating story of a Yale library manuscript, Beinecke MS 408, a book of herbal lore and astrology, written in an indecipherable code. It is also known as the “Voynich manuscript” because of the role of Wilfrid Michael Voynich (a “ Polish-Lithuanian bookdealer and adventurer”) in…
I n a review of new editions of the works of Israeli novelist S.Y. Agnon, Robert Alter highlights Agnon's debts to both his Jewish heritage and modernist revolt against tradition. His description of Agnon's story collection, A City in Its Fullness , captures both sides: “The stories, some folkloric, many…
G arry Wills is the NYRB's resident expert on Evangelicals, and he gives an overview of the Evangelical movement under three headings—crowds, drama, and cycles. It's familiar territory, and much of it is unexceptional—neither mistaken nor particularly insightful. But Wills does include a bit of each—mistake and insight. He spends…
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