Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In the Bible, all the world is a stage, but like the Tabernacle, that stage moves around a lot. David’s defeat of Goliath can only be fully understood as liturgy fulfilled in history. Liturgy, as a sacrifice of praise, is the step-by-step process of resolving a conflict. It relinquishes all…
Aristotle isn’t fundamentally wrong about friendship, nor is the long tradition that follows him. But you might not gather that by reading some of the more pointed critics of the classical conception of friendship. I think, however, that the classical view is not only viable but taken up and fulfilled…
#13 in Theopolis Papers, Seeking Integration in a Fragmented World It is time for me to “cast off” integration, the way a knitter removes a completed scarf from the needles. I want to bring my quest concerning integration to a decent closure, though my happy quest for reality continues. With…
Below are some notes on a particular sub-theme of Daniel 3, namely the downfall of Babylon’s liturgy. First up, a few words on our text’s literary construction. One of the most conspicuous features of Dan. 3 is its author’s love of lists . Personnel are listed (vs. 2, 3, 27),…
Few things in Scripture, few things in the Christian life, are more familiar than the Lord’s Prayer. Sunday after Sunday, we pray these words together with our brothers and sisters. At home, alone or with our families, we pray this prayer daily, as Jesus taught us (Luke 11:2: “When you…
At the 2019 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America, the denominational delegates considered a number of official overtures (requests for action from the regional parts of the denomination) relating to issues of gender and sexuality. The PCA is conservative. As evidence of this, the assembly passed a resolution…
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U Aldrovandi organized his treatise on serpents and dragons (mid-1600s) as follows (Foucault’s summary again): “equivocation (which means the various meanings of the word serpent), synonyms and etymologies, differences, form and description, anatomy, nature and habits, temperament, coitus and generation, voice, movements, places, diet, physiognomy, antipathy, sympathy, modes of capture,…
According to Claude Duret (writing in 1613), Hebrew alone among the languages preserves the original meanings of language, naming the proper essence of things: “Thus the stork, so greatly lauded for it charity towards it father and its mother, is called in Hebrew Chasida, which is to say, meek, charitable,…
O Crollius in his 1624 treatise on “signatures” compared stars and plants: “The stars are the matrix of all the plants and every star in the sky is only the spiritual prefiguration of a plant, such that it represents that plant, and just as each herb or plant is a…
Japan beats Cuba in the world baseball competition. According to the NPR report, during the final game, everyone in the stands - Japanese, Cubans, American spectators - does the wave and dances to YMCA by the Village People. After Japan wins, you can hear “We Are the Champions” in the…
INTRODUCTION Through several chapters, the author of Kings has emphasized Yahweh’s faithfulness and mercy to the Northern kingdom. He sent prophets to the Omride kings, and gives Jehu’s dynasty four generations. But when they’ve persisted in sin, their time is up. THE TEXT “In the twenty-seventh year of Jeroboam king…
Strikingly, Hobbes, like Thomas, treats gratitude under the heading of justice: “Justice of actions is by writers divided into commutative and distributive: and the former they say consisteth in proportion arithmetical; the latter in proportion geometrical. Commutative, therefore, they place in the equality of value of the things contracted for;…
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