Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In the Bible, fatness is such a blessing, that it is especially hard to understand why wicked men are permitted to enjoy such a state. It requires a theodicy and faith in God. Thus: “For they have no pangs until death; their bodies are fat and sleek . They are…
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The allusion to the Exodus story is contained in the first words of Deuteronomy 14:1 — “ye are the sons of Yahweh your God” — as well as in 14:2 in the use of the technical term translated “treasured possession,” “His own possession,” “peculiar people,” “precious people,” and so forth.…
I have argued that Deuteronomy 14:1-21 is an independent literary unit that applies the Third Word to the lives of Israelites from the time of Moses and Joshua. In this short pericope, Moses suggests broad and deep meaning by means of literary allusion to the stories of the creation and…
In his recently republished The New Creation , the late, delightful Herbert McCabe defends the priesthood of the plebs as roundly as anyone could want. Citing Hebrews, he claims that "there is an essential difference between the Christian community and the community of the Old Law, or any other religious…
Augustine famously prayed, “Our hearts our restless until they rest in You.” True indeed. Being creatures, we inherently sense our ontological poverty—our innate condition of dependence—and are compelled to find a sense of security. And it is also true—as Augustine’s own narrative painfully illustrates—that one of the things we most…
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Charles Simic laments the decline of educational standards: “An educated, well-informed population, the kind that a functioning democracy requires, would be difficult to lie to, and could not be led by the nose by the various vested interests running amok in this country. Most of our politicians and their political…
Critical scholarship has made hash of Leviticus. Scholars try to understand the rituals of “P” and “H” without much consideration of the narrative of division, death-sleep, and union that is the creation of Eve. Even the story of Abraham and Isaac is often put to the side as an irrelevancy,…
Darrin Belousek argues in Atonement, Justice, and Peace that “penal substitution is inadequate to explain the textual evidence concerning the several rituals of atonement-making” (177). He’s right. Sin offerings were done in cases where sin is not at issue. Following Jacob Milgrom and others, he points out that the rites…
In his Trinity House lectures on liturgical theology, Jeff Meyers called attention to the anti-liturgy of Genesis 3. Yahweh shows up in glory, meets Adam and Eve, gives a little sermon, kills animals to make skin tunics. The finale is not happy: Adam and Eve are excluded from the garden.…
When the Lamb appears in heaven, the angels begin singing a new song (Revelation 5:9). What’s new about it? Why a new song? The phrase “new song” is used six times in Psalms (33:3; 40:3; 96:1; 98:1; 144:9; 149:1), and once in Isaiah (42:10). The position of these Psalms in…
Austin Stewart of Iowa State may have designed a way to fool chickens into believing they are free range. “Second Livestock” offers “a free-range world wherein chickens stuck in tiny cages in factories would be able to, at least mentally, live out their lives wandering an endless field.” We have…
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