Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
When Jesus says in the farewell discourse that his disciples know the way to where He is going, Thomas replies: “We do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus answers Thomas, but He gives Thomas more than he asked : “I am the way,…
Through the pandemic we learned a lot about infections, how to catch them, what’s contagious, how to protect yourself from getting the infection. I learned a lot of new terms, like “social distancing,” “ppe” (personal protective equipment), N95 masks, and so on. We’ve seen that people are willing to go…
In Genesis 9:20, Noah is called “a man of the soil”. This phrase is a bit of a shock in the Hebrew; though it’s made up of two very common words - 'ish is “man” and 'adamah is “soil” or “ground” - these two words are never used together before…
Harold Bloom’s discussion of Twelfth Night in his Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is, as would be expected, insightful. It displays his deep love of poetry, and includes some truly eloquent descriptions of Orsino: “that sublimely outrageous lover of love” and “amiable erotic lunacy.” Bloom is worth reading just…
There have been times when Evangelicals, in an attempt to be clear about the errors of Rome and Constantinople concerning Mary, have been so denigrating of the mother of our Lord that they sounded more like cut and pasted lines from the Babylonian Talmud than they did disciples of Mary’s…
Awe is the phenomena experienced when one looks up and lights upon the height, majesty, and mystery of the California Redwoods. It appears the trees pierce heaven itself. Among these giant organisms are the Sequoia–while they are shorter in form, they reserve a width that spans an automobile. These trees…
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Intertextuality is a buzz word in contemporary biblical scholarship. In New Testament studies, the impetus has come not only from literary critical approaches but from the “New Perspective on Paul,” whose main advocate, EP Sanders, encouraged the study of Pauline echoes and allusions to the Hebrew Scriptures and contemporary Jewish…
Shlomo Sand argues in How I Stopped Being A Jew that “he foundations on which the State of Israel was created were essentially laid by socialists from the various Eastern European nations. These individuals were secularists who rebelled against Judaism, yet they were forced none the less to adopt from…
In a 2001 article in History of Religious , Guy Stroumsa hightlights the role of John Spencer’s De legibus hebraeorum ritualibus (1685), sometime master of Corpus Christi, Cambridge, in the development of evolutionary and scientific studies of religion. Spencer, in turn, drew heavily on Jewish sources. Stroumsa writes, “Spencer was…
Yahweh promises Abram a son, but he grows old. He knows that his son will come from his own flesh (Genesis 15) but he doesn’t yet know that Sarai will be the mother (cf. Genesis 17). Sarai comes up with a plan: Hagar can serve as surrogate. Sarai’s goal is…
The final chapters of Isaiah are a letdown. From chapter 40 on, Isaiah has given a brilliant portrait of the coming redemption, a return from exile. Yahweh will return to His people. His Servant will bring justice to the nations. Gentile kings - Cyrus especially - will build Yahweh’s house.…
In his Criticism of Heaven , Roland Boer lays out a taxonomy of how Marxism has related to the Bible. There are three categories: biblical Marxism, Catholic Marxism, and the “Protestant turn.” In the first category are Marxists like Ernst Block and Walter Benjamin who interact with Christianity primarily by…
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