Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The drink offering or libation ( nesek ) is mentioned in only three places in the book of Leviticus. When the sheaf of the firstfruits was waved before the Lord, a grain offering was to be burned, along with "its libation, a fourth of a hin of wine [approx. one…
When I became a Calvinist it wasn't long before I learned that John Owen’s The Death of Death in the Death of Christ was regarded as the masterful treatise on what is known as "Limited Atonement"--the "L" in the TULIP mnemonic device for "the five points of Calvinism." This wasn't…
One of the advantages of paying very close attention to the details in the Bible, especially chronological and genealogical details, is that they can shed light on situations that don’t seem to make much sense apart from them. One such situation is that of Bathsheba. It appears that Bathsheba willingly…
The Feast of Ingathering in the seventh month of the Sinaitic calendar is also called the Feast of Sukkoth, of Booths, also called Feast of Tabernacles. I have usually called it by that last phrase, and it is the most common today; but there is a problem: A tabernacle is…
When Matthew’s Gospel was first read aloud to the fledgling Christian congregations, the experience must have been like seeing the words “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” appear afresh on cinema screens in 1999. Yet, unlike The Phantom Menace, the New Testament did not disappoint. Why?…
Fragmentation and integration are phenomena which artist Makoto Fujimura feels bodily, and about which he is concerned profoundly. What do these mean for him? How may we draw his insights into this ongoing consideration—itself integrative—of integration in a fragmented world? Thus far I have been acquainting you with matters already…
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English fairs in earlier centuries displayed wares and displays from all over the world. At one there was an animal described as “a noble creature, which much resembled a Wild Hairy man” whose main skill was to doff his hat and show “his respects to the Company, and smoaks a…
Much of the moral and political import of Shakespeare’s Henry V is left to the audience’s or reader’s judgment. Is Henry a “pig” or is he the mirror of Christian kings? Is his invasion of France fair or foul? Shakespeare doesn’t show his hand, or not much; and one is…
George Barnam notes the careful structure of Act 5 of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus: “Shakespeare had used this scene structurally to build the tension toward the climactic moment when Volumnia should appeal to her son and prevail. Three appeals are made to Marcius, and Shakespeare’s presentation of them matches in structure the…
A reader wrote to respond to my suggestion that high culture is “sacred” and pop culture “profane,” citing the example of sports. Here’s my response: A football game often is a quasi-religious experience, but I’m not sure we use the same language to describe it. If someone slashed da Vinci’s…
In their “cultural history” of English drama, Simon Shepherd and Peter Womack summarize the argument of Glynne Wickham concerning the divorce of stage and sacred: “The English stage - so the argument runs - was predominantly a religious one until Elizabethan Protestantism forced a separation between theatre and the central…
As Marsden describes it, the growth of neoclassical literary sensibilities developed in part in reaction to the chaos and disorder of the English civil war - following in this regard the development of late 17th century political theory. Orderliness, definiteness, clarity became virtues, while ambiguity, double entendres, and inconclusiveness became…
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