Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
There are many legitimate reasons to lament the divided state of the church. Fleshly pride, theological hubris, sectarian rivalries are each in their own ways modern versions of the Galatian heresy, refusing table fellowship with brothers and sisters for whom Christ died. And denominations have frequently played the same role…
Though Bogumil Jarmulak was not able to deliver his lectures on Jurgen Moltmann due to flight delays, he preached at Trinity Presbyterian Church on Sunday morning, June 14. He encouraged the church in how to deal with misery in this life, and pointed them to their only hope in life…
Connecting with the past within the present is a complicated endeavor. One of the most immediate challenges facing us is that of ensuring that, as Christians, our use of the past is undertaken in service of present faithfulness. The past is not a realm to which we retreat, but a…
Dear friend of Theopolis, Before he attended the Theopolis course on Holistic Mission during Easter term, 2014, Jonathan Sedlak lived with his family in the quiet, comfortable Milwaukee suburb of Slinger, Wisconsin. An intensive week in Birmingham changed all that. Listening to missionary Wes Baker and hashing over readings and…
“What is in the nature of these materials?” The Bauhaus, founded in Germany in 1919 by architect Walter Gropius, had a profound influence in every area of design, from graphics and typography to clothing, furniture and architecture. The institution was not so much a style as a method, its philosophy…
Russell Richey's Denominationalism collects some of the most important essays on its titled topic. The authors are a who's-who of 20th century American religious history: Winthrop Hudson, Timothy L. Smith, Sidney Mead, Richey himself, H. Richard Niebuhr and Martin Marty. Some are broad synthetic studies; others are more granular studies…
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Drawing on the work of Christopher Page ( The Christian West and Its Singers: The First Thousand Years ), Wilken ( The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity , 152-3 ) points out that musical notation and the musical staff was an invention of early medieval monks. He…
Ephrem the Syrian’s hymns were celebrated East and West, and Robert Wilken notes ( The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity , 148 ) that one of his contributions was to compose “hymns especially for women to sing.” Describing this, the Syrian Christian Jacob of Sarug pointed to…
Yesterday, I heard a highly stimulating sermon on gnat theology (Exodus 8:16-18) from my friend, Pastor David Deutsch of Grace Reformed Church in Camarillo, California. Gnats arise from dust; dust is cursed, a symbol of death. From that association, David drew the inference that gnats on man and beast is…
W. Allen Orr reviews Thomas Nagel’s recent Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False in the NYRB . Orr sums up Nagel’s assault on neo-Darwinian reductionism this way: “Nagel insists that the mind-body problem ‘is not just a local problem’ but ‘invades our…
Scott Moonen sent along a report on studies that indicate that babies already respond to language in utero . “”Forty infants, about 30 hours old and an even mix of girls and boys, were studied in Tacoma and Stockholm, Sweden.” The findings: “Babies only hours old are able to differentiate…
Lev Shestov ( All Things are Possible , 64) observes that it is a “school axiom” that “logical skepticism refutes itself, since the denial of the possibility of positive knowledge is already an affirmation.” Shestov doesn’t think this works: For starters, “skepticism is not bound to be logical, for it…
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