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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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Suburban Ponzi Scheme

Charles Marohn, Jr. ( Thoughts on Building Strong Towns, 1 ) calls suburbanization a "grand experiment" in urban planning and growth. His less neutral description is that it's a "Ponzi scheme." Since World War II, suburbanization has occurred in several phases. First, "transfer payments" from state and federal government funded…

January 25, 2018

Jonah, Jews, Gentiles, Part 2

As it turns out, Jonah is not very successful at flight. He goes down, down, down, but as he descends he continues to witness as a prophet. When the Lord throws a storm on the sea, the sailors wake Jonah to ask him to call on his god for help.…

January 24, 2018

Jonah, Jews, Gentiles, Part 1

The word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Ammitai, and instructed him to go to Nineveh to cry out against it. Nineveh is a great city, the capital of the Assyrian empire. Assyria is the rising power in Jonah’s day, and it is a cruel empire, known…

January 23, 2018

Anti-Hegel

Mark Lilla devotes a chapter of The Shipwrecked Mind to an exposition of the thought of Franz Rosenzweig, setting him in the context of the 20th-century revolt against Hegel. It was, on the one hand, a revolt against 19th-century Hegelian conceptions of history: "Throughout the nineteenth century, Hegel had been…

January 23, 2018

Calendrical Patterns in 2 Chronicles

At various points, 2 Chronicles indicates the month during which some event occurred. The dates tie the events to moments in Israel's liturgical calendar. 2 Chronicles 5:3 is explicit. Solomon assembles "all the men of Israel" to Jerusalem "at the feast, that is the seventh month." At the end of…

January 22, 2018

Storied Bodies

The next time you have a space 15 minutes, treat yourself to the Wingfeather Saga short film on Youtube. It's a quarter hour of sheer delight. One of the most arresting things about the segment is the way it provides rich, mysterious backgrounds for the characters. The characters live in…

January 19, 2018

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