Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The story of Judges 19 and the subsequent chapters are some of the most shocking and appalling accounts in all of Scripture. The callousness of the old host and the Levite, and the monstrous brutality of the men of Gibeah, leaves us feebly scrabbling for words by which to surmount…
David has become king. He has conquered the capital city of Jerusalem. He has brought the ark of Yahweh into the city and placed it in a tent. He has stationed Levites at the tent to offer sacrifices of praise. An anomaly hits him: He has a cedar-paneled palace, and…
In Part 2 of this series we traced what we have of the development of the epiclesis in the liturgy of the Church. In this third and final part we’ll look at the theological implications of this and how we may apply what we’ve learned. As we saw in Part…
In a 2014 piece published in First Things , I offered a "wish list" for Protestant churches, a checklist for a future catholic Protestantism. The wish list doesn't cover everything. It doesn't mention those things that Protestants, especially Evangelicals, already do, often exceedingly well, things like missions and evangelism and…
In the first part of this series we examined the meaning of “blessing” in Scripture and its parallels in Jewish liturgical tradition, but did not find anything that we could properly call an epiclesis (an invocation of the Holy Spirit). We did find examples of invocation of Jesus to “come”…
When the Aaronic priests were ordained, the blood of the ram of "filling” was placed on the lobe of the right ear, the right thumb, and the right big toe (Lev. 8:22-24). Similarly, the cleansing rite for a leper included smearing the right ear lobe, thumb, and big toe with…
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N o American needs to be told that it’s been a tumultuous, often bewildering, political season. Democrats were rocked from the left by an aging socialist; the GOP has been taken over by a politically inexperienced showman. Clearly, the natives are restless. About what? What do Trump supporters want? What…
Y ahweh promises David an enduring house. David doesn’t take it for granted, but immediately asks the Lord to keep His word (1 Chronicles 17:23). Given a promise of God, David doesn’t merely wait for it to be fulfilled. He turns the promise to prayer. The prayer has a neat…
I n his The Territories of Science and Religion , Peter Harrison gives examples of the shift that took place in the understanding of the natural world. It was a shift from a “symbolic” understanding of the natural world to a utilitarian and mathematical one. He lists some titles that…
H ow do you rank the best golfers? Tallying up the wins doesn’t tell the whole story. The quality of the competition matters, as do the number of golfers in a tournament. Using a variety of complicated metrics, the Economist ranked the late Arnold Palmer among the greats of golf…
W riting in Christianity Today , Timothy C. Morgan reports on an archeological discovery in Kazakhstan, a few dozen miles from the border with China: “A team of archaeologists uncovered seven Christian gravestones late this summer in the ancient Silk Road city of Ilyn Balik near the Kazakhstan-China border. The…
J ohn Crowe of the University of California, Davis, may not have built molecular engines, but he’s been up to some cool stuff over the past forty years. He’s been working with “water bears,” more technically “tardigrades,” described in a profile of the scientist a “speck-sized organisms that can dry…
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