Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
If 1 Chronicles were a movie, it would begin with two hours and forty-five minutes of credits: Name after name scrolling across the screen, most of them (as far as we’re concerned) obscurities and nonentities and unknowns, forgotten fathers and sons and mighty men; all the bit players in the…
Let me locate myself. I’m sitting on a sand dune, three hundred feet above the blue-as-a-swimmer-crab water of Lake Michigan. I’m so high above the surface that the sound of the waves flopping onto the beach is as quiet as wind easing through a screen door. Around me are several…
My title is too grand. What I offer here falls far short of a full description of poetry. I barely offer a definition. A more accurate title would be “Axioms and Suspicions About Poetry.” Axioms first. I have three of them. The first is the closest I can come to…
In his book In Defense of Food Michael Pollan does just what the title suggests, he defends food. Pollan argues that the presupposition behind modern food science, or “nutritionism” as he calls it, is that humans don’t need food, they need nutrients. To be sure, modern science is not yet…
The early church took possession of the Roman Empire within a few centuries, largely because she ministered sacrificially in word and deed. The church provided services and care that the empire and pagan religions could not in times of crisis. The faithful witness of those serving Christians bore great fruit…
My title, “The Original Murder” will be understood by many readers, if not almost all, to refer to Cain’s murder of Abel, but I have in mind the very first murder, the one which Jesus pointed to when He said that Satan was a murderer “from the beginning.” “You are…
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Lindberg points out that “Calvin’s Protestant contemporaries did not view Geneva as a vengeful theocracy. Thousands of religious refugees flocked to Geneva from nearly every province in France, as well as from England, Scotland, Holland, Italy, Spain, Germany, Poland, and Bohemia. When they returned hom, they took Calvinism with them.”…
Lindberg summarizes the important, if sometimes inadvertent, cultural contributions of monasticism: “Monastic culture was not limited to copying texts from the past, but also engaged in a variety of intellectual pursuits related to monastic life. These included maintaining a liturgical calendar; mathematics for managing estates; calculations for determining times of…
In his recent Brief History of Christianity , Carter Lindberg suggests that “orthodoxy is the language that preserves the promise character of the gospel, that salvation is received from God, not achieved by humans.” By contrast, “heresy is the language that in one way or another vitiates the promise of…
In his book on the work of Christ, Robert Letham has this neat summary of the relation of present to future justification: “faith has an eschatological side to it. Paul can say we are justified by faith (Rom. 5:1) but he can equally talk of our being saved in hope…
Philip Hardie argues that the shield of Aeneas in Virgil’s Aeneid makes significant use not only of the Homeric description of the shield of Achilles but of ancient allegorizations of Homer’s description: “The central feature of ancient exegesis is its insistence that the great circle of the Shield of Achilles,…
Andrew Bowie’s *Aesthetics and subjectivity from Kant to Nietzsche* emphasizes the role of aesthetic theory in the development of post-Kantian notions of the subject. He points out that some philosophers challenged Cartesian and Kantian views by direct appeal to aesthetic experience: “these theories . . . regard the experience of…
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