Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
This essay is adapted from my articles in Theopolis’s In Medias Res as a series of Holy Week meditations. Like many celebrities such as Kanye or Beyoncé or Adele, Josquin des Prez (d. 1521) was often known only by his first name, in his own time as now. “Josquin” is…
Sight is a major theme in the scriptures. The church has long identified sight’s relationship to the future fulfillment of the eschaton. As Paul says, “For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face” (1 Cor 13.12). Sight is associated with…
What is the chief end of man? —yes, to glorify God and enjoy him forever. But how ought man–and all creation–so glorify him? I propose a Theopolitan addition to the catechism, question and answer number 1.5, begun in the last question and answered as follows: Earth’s inhabitants were created to…
Naphtali is a hind let loose: he giveth goodly words. Genesis 49:21 Frederick Buechner once said, “We move into the extraordinary by way of the ordinary.” In poetry, this happens by way of a compressed code of analogs; often, two or more very ordinary things begin to reveal something that…
The evangelical milieu of America has often lost a vision of the fruit of repentance. We tend to simplify repentance by asking for forgiveness. After all, Jesus tells Peter to forgive 70 times 7. This verse must be paired with Paul’s scoffing at the question: why not sin more so…
I. The hemorrhaging woman. En route to Jairus’ house, Jesus is touched by a woman with a hemorrhage of blood (Matt 9:18–26; Mk 5:21–34; Lk 8:40–48). The story is one that many of us know very well. She has been yoked to her illness for twelve years, all of her…
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C. S. Lewis has some wise words about sex in the Eros chapter of The Four Loves : “our advertisements, at their sexiest, paint the whole business in terms of the rapt, the intense, the swoony-devout; seldom a hint of gaiety. And the psychologists have so bedevilled us with the…
Eve Sweetser of UC Berkeley has a review of a book by Susan Goldin-Meadow in the June 10 issue of Nature . The book is entitled Hearing Gesture and it seeks to answer several questions about the cognitive role of gesture: “is gesture really a window on thought? If it…
Baruch Halpern argues in his 2001 biography of David, David’s Secret Demons , that David was the first individualist, the first modern man. Part of his evidence is that David so often violates conventions in surprising ways. He offers David’s battle with Goliath as an example. Contrary to the popular…
The Gifts of God, Hebrews 9:1-10 INTRODUCTION It is often said that we come to worship to give and not to receive. That is a dangerous half-truth. Praise, thanks, adoration are all part of worship, of course, and God delights in our praise. But in worship as in all of…
Iain Provan suggests the following interpretation of Ecclesiastes 8:12-13: “The clear implication of his thinking must be that there is some ‘time’ beyond the ‘times’ of life in which wrongs can be righted and imbalanced corrected; yet as we have seen Qohelet is agnostic about life after death (3:18-21) .…
Evensong A full moon rises from behind The topmost branches of a tree, Then slants across the sky. A pheasant?s shriek joins distant shouts, The barks and laughter from the park, On the cooling air. Then comes the silence of the night: Not the silence of the dead, But too…
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