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Writing

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

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Technology

Simulation as Inoculation

Every advent of new media creates the justifiable reaction from some that the necessarily accompanied amputation may not be worth the extension made possible by the new tools. This is not unique to the Digital Age. Lamoignon Malesherbes, the French politician who was counsel for the defense of Louis XVI,…

by Garrett SoucyApril 2, 2024
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Eschatology

Reject Optimism

A response to Gage Crowder's " The Hole in our Hope ?" Already, the first pages of the Bible promise a bright future. The story starts with the creation of heaven and earth, where heaven is perfect, but the earth is in a state of formless emptiness. Yet, God takes…

by Bogumil JarmulakMarch 27, 2024
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Eschatology

The Hole in our Hope? A Rejoinder

A rejoinder to Bubu Jarmulak's essay, " Embrace Pessimism ." Whereas calumnious critiques are reflections of more on the critic than the work criticized, good critiques are always opportunities for reassessment and improvement if they are received as such . Since its renaissance, the biblical doctrine of postmillennialism—or “optimistic eschatology,”…

by Gage CrowderMarch 26, 2024
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Biblical Studies

Jesus Did Not Pray to Avoid the Cross at Gethsemane

Several decades ago, a pastor (and friend) mentioned in passing at one of our regular breakfasts together that he wasn’t satisfied with the usual reading of Jesus’s prayer in Gethsemane, the usual reading being that Jesus asked the Father to avoid the Cross at Gethsemane. We turned to the passage,…

by James R. RogersMarch 19, 2024
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Church Music

Holy Toledo: A Critique of Eclecticism

On May 21, 1604, the cathedral of Toledo in Spain held job interviews for the post of choirmaster, the head of music at the church. The position had been vacated when the previous occupant, Alonso Lobo, was poached by the nearby cathedral of Seville, and Toledo needed a replacement who…

by John AhernMarch 5, 2024
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Covenant

The Docetic Covenant and Phantom Church Membership

Imagine — counterfactually: on the night he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus held up an empty hand and said, ‘This is the blood of the covenant poured out for you. Drink of it.’ But there was no cup, no wine, nothing. If there’s no sign of the covenant, is there…

by John CarpenterFebruary 27, 2024

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Sermon outline

INTRODUCTION Hope is a spring of human action. We do what we do because we hope to accomplish something by our actions, and when we are truly hopeless we do nothing at all. Scripture teaches us that we raise our children in hope, as well as in faith and love.…

November 20, 2007
Politics

Plato’s anti-democracy

Reviewing Malcolm Schofield’s Plato: Political Philosophy in the TLS, Jonathan Lear offers this superb precis of Plato’s politics: “For Plato, one cannot understand politics unless one grasps the nature and structure of human desire. Political scientists must be students of the human soul: for one cannot understand the problem of…

November 20, 2007
Politics

Plato’s anti-democracy

Reviewing Malcolm Schofield’s Plato: Political Philosophy in the TLS, Jonathan Lear offers this superb precis of Plato’s politics: “For Plato, one cannot understand politics unless one grasps the nature and structure of human desire. Political scientists must be students of the human soul: for one cannot understand the problem of…

November 20, 2007
History

Romantic form

Formalism seems a classical obsession, but Angela Leighton argues in her recent On Form that the key moment came with romanticism. Schiller said that in a beautiful poem “the content should do nothing, the form everything . . . . the real artistic secret of the master consists in his…

November 20, 2007
History

God and Gold

Walter Russell Mead’s recent God and Gold explores the uncanny success of Anglo-American power since the seventeenth century, what Mead calls “the biggest geopolitical story of modern times: the birth, rise, triumph, defence, and continuing grown of Anglo-American power despite continuing and always renewed opposition and conflict.” Since the late…

November 20, 2007
Philosophy

Immanentism and dualism

In the same article, Milbank argues that “dualism and hierarchy are . . . the secret heart of all immanentisms.” The argument is: In 18th and 19th century design arguments, God is “half-immanent” and interacts “on the same plane with what he influences.” This is a dualism between “the creative…

November 20, 2007

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