Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Bruce Marshall once wrote that every young man who rings the bell at a brothel is unconsciously looking for God. While it is not necessarily true that the inward desire of every man is ultimately a thirst for righteousness, it is true that every sin is the disordering of a…
In a previous essay , I argued that the story which begins with Lot and culminates in Ruth’s great-grandson David follows God’s five-fold pattern of creative work as laid out by Jim Jordan: taking something in hand (in this case, the Abrahamic family), restructuring it, distributing the product of labor,…
Gilder, George. Men and Marriage. Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2023. 1 By 1973, the hightide of second-wave feminism had flooded the beaches of American culture. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique eroded the shores of traditional female roles by naming and stirring up further domestic discontentment. Kate Millet wrote her dissertation-turned-book,…
The Book of Job is a very tortuous book. The arguments of Job and his friends are shot through with truth and error hopelessly mixed together. Every line of contentious poetry stands locked in deadly battle with every other line. As maddening as this can be for a reader who…
More than once in the last 50 years it has occurred to me that Paul might have known Jesus before He appeared to Paul on the Damascus road, but I had never taken up the notion in earnest until recently when I ran into a book by Stanley Porter titled…
The question in the title is genuine, not polemic. I could be perfectly happy to follow an ancient — and what is regarded as a well-attested — tradition. But I do not feel compelled to follow it simply because it is tradition. I would like to have arguments that Peter…
Showing page 27 of 309
Showing page 5 of 43
Allen Kerkeslager argues in a 1993 JBL article that the bowman riding on the white horse is a false Messiah (Revelation 6:2). He looks Messianic, what with his white horse. But the bow is the clue. Kerkeslager connects the bow to Psalm 11:2, 78:57 and other Old Testament texts where…
Our English translations give the impression that Jesus misquotes Isaiah. Isaiah 29:13 is translated “they remove their hearts far from me,” but Jesus is quoted as saying “Well did Isaiah prophesy . . . their heart ( kardia auton ) is far from me” (Mark 7:6). Jesus seems to change…
NT Wright often complains that traditional Christology works only with the two poles of the gospel story—incarnation and atonement—and ignores the middle. A number of recent writers have complained that atonement theology has been detached from ecclesiology. The two complaints are linked, and they have a common solution. If we…
By most accounts, J.D. Salinger was an unpleasant piece of work. The NYTBR reviewer of Thomas Beller’s new biography, subtitled The Escape Artist , observes that “Salinger’s disturbing icon-sullying behavior has appeared in memoirs by his daughter (describing a selfish urine-drinking monomaniac) and by Joyce Maynard (revealing an unsavory penchant…
Todd Decker’s Who Should Sing “Ol’ Man River “ isn’t the story of the song’s origins so much as its afterlife. It’s a performance history, but one designed to see how the performances shaped the song and reflect the changing landscape of race in American culture. Decker writes, “‘Ol’ Man…
David Crystal has plundered the Oxford Thesaurus to come up with a compilation of oddities and forgotten words in Words in Time and Place . Crystal chose words based on several criteria: They choice of fields had to reflect the thesaurus as a whole; he wanted to reflect the global…
Showing page 556 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
