Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
If you’re a preacher looking for good commentaries on Ezra, you’ll struggle. Certainly to find ones that wrestle in good detail with the text. And certainly ones that don’t cost you an arm and a leg. There’s a good bit more for Nehemiah, which is odd, as the two are…
Quick thought experiment: try to pretend you’ve never read 1 John before. Read 1:1-6. Go ahead; I’ll wait. Now, on to v. 7: “But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with ______….” What word would you expect in that blank, based…
In my work as a Bible translator, I was recently checking our translation team’s draft of Genesis 8:8, which says of Noah (translating the Hebrew quite literally): And he sent out the dove from with him to see: had the waters lessened from upon the face of the ground? Part…
Just in case a reader may not know Weinberg, he is a theoretical physicist and the winner of the Nobel prize in physics in 1979, as well as countless other prizes for his research. He is also a prolific, lucid, and captivating writer. If you want to read something on…
Colossians 1:15-20 is a famous passage in Paul’s epistles because it is a succinct and powerful poem. It appears even to have been a hymn. Given the uniquely Pauline language — “reconciliation” is a term used only by Paul — it should not seem odd to attribute the poem/hymn to…
Stalker (1979) is a film by Andrei Tarkovsky based on Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers. It shows a day from the life of a stalker, a man who enters the so-called "Zone", an Alien landing site, where he leads people to a room that grants people’s innermost desires, which…
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Elias notes that table manners reflect social relations more generally: “People who ate together in the way customary in the Middle Ages, taking meat with their fingers from the same dish, wine from the same goblet, soup from the same pot or the same plate . . . - such…
Elias again: “In the eleventh century a Venetian doge married a Greek princess. In her Byzantine circle the fork was clearly in use. At any rate, we hear that she lifted food to her mouth ‘by means of little gold forks with two prongs.’ “This gave rise in Venice to…
Elias suggests that the blossoming of German literature in the late 18th century was largely led by middle-class writers and thinkers whose tastes and styles ran directly counter to the Francophile culture of Frederick’s court: “This German literary movement, whose exponents included Klopstock, Herder, Lessing, the poets of Sturm und…
A couple of weeks ago, I quoted Frederick the Great’s judgment that Shakespeare’s plays were fit only for “savages of Canada,” what with their “jumble of lowliness and grandeur, of buffoonery and tragedy,” their sins “against all the rules of the theatre, rules which are not at all arbitrary.” Frederick…
A few scattered notes on this section of John’s first epistle. 1) There is a repeated emphasis on the contrast between word and action, word and walk. Three times John uses the clause “if we say that” (1:6, 8, 10), and another three times he uses “the one who says”…
INTRODUCTION John’s gospel is about the character of God: He proclaims that God is light, and has no darkness at all (1:5). This gospel comes with the demand to walk in the light (1:6). What does that mean? THE TEXT “This is the message which we have heard from Him…
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