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Writing

Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.

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Masculinity

Ringing the Brothel Door

Bruce Marshall once wrote that every young man who rings the bell at a brothel is unconsciously looking for God. While it is not necessarily true that the inward desire of every man is ultimately a thirst for righteousness, it is true that every sin is the disordering of a…

by Garrett SoucyOctober 31, 2023
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Ruth

Work and Gratitude in Ruth

In a previous essay , I argued that the story which begins with Lot and culminates in Ruth’s great-grandson David follows God’s five-fold pattern of creative work as laid out by Jim Jordan: taking something in hand (in this case, the Abrahamic family), restructuring it, distributing the product of labor,…

by Josh JensenOctober 27, 2023
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Books

Men, Marriage, and the Feminine Imperative: A Review of "Men and Marriage"

Gilder, George. Men and Marriage. Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2023. 1 By 1973, the hightide of second-wave feminism had flooded the beaches of American culture. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique eroded the shores of traditional female roles by naming and stirring up further domestic discontentment. Kate Millet wrote her dissertation-turned-book,…

by Bill SmithOctober 17, 2023
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Galatians

Get Behind Me, Eliphaz!

The Book of Job is a very tortuous book. The arguments of Job and his friends are shot through with truth and error hopelessly mixed together. Every line of contentious poetry stands locked in deadly battle with every other line. As maddening as this can be for a reader who…

by Jonathan WhiteOctober 10, 2023
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Apostle Paul

Before His Conversion, Paul Knew Jesus

More than once in the last 50 years it has occurred to me that Paul might have known Jesus before He appeared to Paul on the Damascus road, but I had never taken up the notion in earnest until recently when I ran into a book by Stanley Porter titled…

by Ralph Allan SmithOctober 4, 2023
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Acts

Did Peter Found the Church in Rome?

The question in the title is genuine, not polemic. I could be perfectly happy to follow an ancient — and what is regarded as a well-attested — tradition. But I do not feel compelled to follow it simply because it is tradition. I would like to have arguments that Peter…

by Ralph Allan SmithSeptember 26, 2023

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Holistic Mission

Registration is now open for the Easter term intensive course on holistic mission at Trinity House. The course will be held at Trinity Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, March 17-21, 2014. The goal of missions is to build holistic, sustainable, and self-propagating Christian communities, or to use the Biblical idiom, to…

January 14, 2014

Blessed are the meek

The word ‘anaw , “humble” or “meek” is used 13x in the Psalter. It refers to a social position; it’s not only, or even primarily, an attitude of mind, but a life-condition. The meek are the afflicted, low-born, abused. Within the Psalter the word forms a story-arc of sorts. Early…

January 13, 2014

Gay Marriage and Religious Freedom

Miles Kimball of the University of Michigan argues that supporting gay marriage is support for religious freedom. After all, most of the opposition to gay marriage is religious, and in America we aren’t permitted to impose our religion on other people. Besides, Kimball says, gay marriage is an avenue for…

January 13, 2014

Culture Industry and Imagination

Reflecting on our culture’s penchant for remakes in the NYTBR , James Parker traces the phenomenon to a “commercial factor here: the enormous built-in timidity of the culture industry, which will always be happier with a remake than a new thing. Once youve assembled a hero, a hero that works,…

January 13, 2014

Modes of Existence

Jonathan Ree reviews Bruno Latour’s An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns in the TLS , and along the way sums up some of Latour’s contributions to social science. Latour’s early work in the anthropology of science, emphasizing the “social construction” of scientific facts, earned him…

January 13, 2014

Writing Competitively

Tim Parks’s piece asking why published authors are shown so much respect begins with the career of Salman Rushdie. An easy mark. But Parks’s larger point still stands: “No one is treated with more patronizing condescension than the unpublished author or, in general, the would-be artist. At best he is…

January 12, 2014

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