Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Creationism is debated widely in the US, especially when it comes to teaching creation as an alternative theory of origins in public schools. Every few months, there’s another poll showing that many Americans still believe Ussher’s claim that the world was created around 4000 BC, which always elicits a contemptuous…
Walker Percy died in 1990, but his six published novels and his collections of essays are more relevant than when he wrote them. Percy was an American Dostoevsky, and that was no accident. “The European novels,” he says in a 1974 interview, “are more philosophical, more novels of ideas.” Dostoevsky,…
The Spirit is God’s agent for renewing the creation, for restoring bonds between nations, for knitting together people into the body of Christ. The Spirit is the renewer of the world, and the bond of all relations. That means that if you want your family to be knit together, if…
In their basic physical sense , the verbs translated as "persecute" in the Bible mean “chase” or “pursue,” and that fits the context quite naturally. As Pharaoh “pursued” (LXX, dioko ; Heb. radaph ) Israel into the wilderness, for example, so the dragon chases the woman back to her place…
Seng-Kong Tan’s Fullness Received and Returned is a densely argued, thoroughly researched, contextually sensitive study of participation in the soteriology of Jonathan Edwards. Along the way, Tan deals with many of the central themes in Edwards’s theology. As with many recent studies of Edwards, Tan’s monograph demonstrates both Edwards’s creativity…
The title of James Joyce’s first novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man indicates that it is a bildungsroman , a story of formation that describes the formative experiences of a poet who aspires to artistic greatness. The education described is Joyce’s own. The novel recounts the failing…
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S acred Space in Early Modern Europe , edited by Will Coster and Andrew Spicer, aims to fill a gap in accounts of early modern Europe. Despite intense attention to sacred space among anthropologists, scholars of comparative religion, historians, and sociologists, few studies of early modern Europe have paid attention…
S cott Hendrix argues that the Reformation was united by an agenda of Christianization. By “Christianization,” he means, first, the effort “to reform the rituals of late-medieval piety in conformity with sound doctrine” and, second, the goal “to create more sincere and intentional believers by transforming people's minds and hearts”…
Margo Todd's The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland is an extraordinarily rich study. One brief note will serve to illustrate. “A visitor to an early seventeenth-century Scottish church had no difficulty seeing the social structure of the community in the arrangement of seats.” The principle was simple: The…
It's time for “Bluexit,” argues Kevin Baker at The New Republic , a blue-state secession. Here's the thesis: Blues fund most of the federal government, and are responsible for most of the economic output of the country. Red states receive vastly more federal aid than they pay in, and then…
M ona Charen states the obvious : “There are good and bad arguments against immigration.” In today's overheated political climate, though, the obvious gets drowned by sensational horrors. The horrors are truly horrific, but they aren't typical. Charen writes, “I am sympathetic to some restrictionist points, but smearing immigrants as…
I n an essay on Alexander Schmemann (in Ordering Love , 301-2), David L. Schindler observes that “Creaturely power begins in wonder and gratitude before the inherent beauty of the other. The power of creaturely being originates and consists primarily in the beauty of the Other: it is the attractiveness…
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