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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The macro-structures of The Fairie Queene become clear if we look at a single book in detail. Book 1 is a good place to start. It is the story of Holiness, focused on the Redcrosse Knight and Una. Redcrosse is called upon to rescue the parents of a damsal in…
John Podhoretz ( Weekly Standard , March 2) admits that he giggled his way through Fifty Shades of Grey . The movie. He doesn't seem in a giggly mood about the novels, which he describes as “the worst books I have every read all the way through.” But Podhoretz spots…
Theodore Vial's Liturgy Wars is a rich and detailed account of the struggle over the change in the baptismal rite in 19th-century Zurich. He picks the knot of this culture war, unraveling the political, theological, and ritual dimensions of the the battle between liberalizing and conserving forces. Vial's aims go…
Chris Jenks argues in Subculture that “postmodernism’s critical imperative recommending the end of grand narratives is an invitation to dispense with the power/knowledge, truth and authority on which society, and, in many senses, the social bond, of yesterday were established” (3). One of the key theoretical tools has been an…
Brian Howell's In the Eyes of God is a substantial contribution to the discussion of theological language and to our understanding of the workings of biblical anthropomorphism. His approach rests on the “three legs” of “the biblical depiction of the divine-human relationship, divine Speech Acts, and context-sensitive metaphorical interpretation” (57).…
David Hawkes's TLS review of Marisa Cull's Shakespeare's Princes of Wales sums up the influence of Wales on Elizabethan England, and on England's Bard in particular: “The Bard (the very term has a specifically Welsh provenance) had a Welsh grandmother, Alys Griffin. The man who taught him his ‘small Latin,'…
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