Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
For ye had compassion of me in my bonds, and took joyfully the spoiling of your goods, knowing in yourselves that ye have in heaven a better and an enduring substance. Hebrews 10:34 There is an old Puritan dictum that goes, “Sit lightly on the world.” George MacDonald places it…
As Genesis unfolds, God chooses a line of promise out of the nations. One by one its offshoots are peeled away as the story zooms in on God’s chosen people, Israel. First, the line of Cain is peeled away as Cain is sent out from the presence of YHWH. Though…
The following article was an address given to Anselm Presbytery (CREC) in the Fall 2024. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Pray with me. Father of Heavenly Lights and fount of all Wisdom, guide us we pray, by your Word and Spirit,…
At my age, I’ve given up on the fantasy of “keeping up.” Much of my reading is now narrowly focused, research-reading in service of writing projects. If you want bibliography on the ontology of artifacts in Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas (which you don’t), or the purity laws of Leviticus, or…
I have been reading, thinking, and writing about the Internet and its effects upon our identities, communities, polities, and discourses for nearly a copy of decades. In that time, I have encountered no book as perceptive on the subject as Antón Barba-Kay’s A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature…
Identifying the men Paul refers to as “enemies of the cross” in Philippians 3:18 turns out to be relatively difficult. Peter O’Brian speaks of “all kinds of suggestions regarding their identity,” and offers a list of interpretations: “moral libertinists, behavioural materialists, orthodox Jews, lapsed or apostate Christians—because of persecution, Jewish…
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Kumar suggests that “some of the principal hall-marks of modernity” are already evident in the Christian notions of time and history. Both Christianity and modernity separate time from nature, and humanize time; time is seen by both as “linear and irreversible”; both see history as an Aristotelian drama with beginning,…
The Latin modernus was coined in the late fifth century, as an antonym to antiquus , and variations of modernus became particularly common after the 10th century. Thus, Krishan Kumar writes, “Modernity is . . . an invention of the Christian Middle Ages,” and was used to emphasize the radical…
Poster lists four effects that computer communications (email, chat groups, etc) have on the self: “1 they introduce new possibilities for playing with identities; 2 they degender communications by removing gender cues; 3 they destabilize existing hierarchies in relationships and re-hierarchize communications according to criterio that were previously irrelevant; and…
Descartes famously contrasted the mind (res cogitans) with the external world (res extensa), but Mark Poster suggests that computer writing fudges that distinction: “the computer dematerializes the written trace. As inputs are made to the computer through the keyboard, pixels of phosphor are illuminated on the screen, pixels that are…
Mark Poster points to a tension between the modern institutions of production and the postmodern technologies of communication, particularly as they impact the formation of the self: “If modernity or the mode of production signifies patterned practices that elicit identities as autonomous and (instrumentally) rational, postmodernity or the mode of…
Prior to World War I, Telefon Hirmondo, the telephone system of Budapest, was used as a broadcast system, with a published schedule of programs that were restricted to certain classes of people in Hungary. Only later did it develop into a communications system in which everyone could pass information to…
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