Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I was still a high school student the first time I read Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, but I will never forget the powerful impact the book had on me. Of course, as a second year student, I did not fully digest the book. In spite of subsequent readings, I…
Crises force questions of identity. Identities may remain assumed until some event, or series of events, challenge what may have been taken for granted. The search for identity is an anxious one precisely because it tends to happen in times of upheaval and uncertainty. In his recent book, Orthoxox Anglican…
Peter Leithart recently wrote a fascinating short piece about the Half Shekel Temple Tax as an atonement. Leithart argues three main points. First that the Sanctuary Shekel was heavier, i.e., more valuable than the everyday shekel. Second, he offers some analysis about the order of magnitude of the purchasing power…
There is no denial from the careful reader that 1 Samuel 24 and 26 are telling the same story. Perhaps we should say, virtually the same story. But that the stories are cut from the same cloth is undeniable. What we have over these three chapters—1 Samuel 24-26—is a very…
In his novel That Hideous Strength , C.S. Lewis is able to masterfully illustrate in narrative form so many of his insights about the subversive dangers of Leftist political dogma to Christian civilization. Perceptive essays from Lewis like “The Abolition of Man” and “The Inner Ring” are fleshed out in…
At a very practical level, the Evangelical Church has been injected with counterfeit spiritualities. We are a people looking for a city, whose builder may only be in office for four years. Our temptation to veer to the side of the temporal is striking in our day, especially as the…
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Sophie Read's Eucharist and the Poetic Imagination in Early Modern England examines six early modern English poets on the assumption that “particularities of belief can be made manifest in the verbal texture of a literary work: that there is an analogy between the rhetorical and theological plans of understanding, and…
Karen Jobes ( 1 Peter ) understates the point when she says that 1 Peter 3 is “more obscure than we might wish,” but she highlights the central point of Peter's odd claim that Jesus preached to spirits in prison: “(1)Being linked with 3:13-17 by hoti kai (because also, 3:18),…
Susan Holman devotes a few pages of her The Hungry Are Dying , a study of “beggars and bishops” in Cappadocia, to a sketch of Rabbinic teaching on almsgiving, drawn from the writings of the Talmudim. The poor appear in three main contexts in rabbinic writing: “First, they are recognized…
English Bibles rarely employ the words “ceremony,” “rite,” or “ritual” to translate biblical terms. The NASB, for example, uses the words “ritual” and “rite” in only three instances, all having to do with the Passover (Exodus 12:25-26; 13:5). The Authorized Version uses the word “ritual” only at Number 9:3. The…
Anthony Carroll summarizes his Protestant Modernity in a 2009 article in the Archives of European Sociology . Recognizing that Weber's theory of secularization “has greatly influenced later social theorists in their accounts of secularisation, rationalisation, and modernisation,” he wanted to set Weber's theory “within its liberal Protestant heritage.” This is…
The ruined city Babylon is a city where things that used to happen don't happen anymore. John's description is under the rubric “no longer” ( ou eti , used 6x in Revelation 18:21-24). In Babylon, music, crafts, milling, light, and weddings have ceased. The old has passed, the new has…
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