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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The sea beast wages war against the saints (Revelation 13:7), assisted by the land beast (13:11-15), also known as the “false prophet” (16:13; 19:20; 20:10). That the land beast is a prophet gives us a big clue to what’s happening. Prophets end and initiate covenants; prophets are the sacred architects…
In the Levitical law, the priests received two particular portions of each peace offering: the “wave offering” of the breast and the “heave offering” (or better, “contribution”) of the right thigh. The purpose of this essay is to attempt to determine the reason why the second of these, the thigh,…
Robert Pogue Harrison glances at his father’s college yearbook and finds that “twelve-year-old boys looked like little adults, their faces furrowed by the depths of time” ( Juvenescence , x). We’re younger now: “the first-world face of today remains callow, even as it withers away with age, never attaining the…
Neoteny comes from two Greek words, “new” and “hold.” As Robert Pogue Harrison defines it ( Juvenescence , 18), evolutionary biology speaks of neoteny as the “persistence of fetal, larval, or juvenile features in adult organisms.” Harrison means something more broader, “a modified type of development that brings juvenile traits…
John’s description of the land beast and his work in Revelation 13:11-15 is organized in a fairly neat chiasm: A. Another beast like a lamb, speaking as a dragon, 13:11 B. He has the authority of the first beast, 13:12a C. He makes land-dwellers worship the first beast, who was…
Robert McAfee Brown summarizes The Spirit of Protestantism as “an openness to the judging and renewing activity of the living God made known in Jesus Christ.” It’s a willingness to “submit to the corrective activity of God,” and “to live at risk.” Protestantism claims that it’s only in “constant renewal…
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