Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Bruce Marshall once wrote that every young man who rings the bell at a brothel is unconsciously looking for God. While it is not necessarily true that the inward desire of every man is ultimately a thirst for righteousness, it is true that every sin is the disordering of a…
In a previous essay , I argued that the story which begins with Lot and culminates in Ruth’s great-grandson David follows God’s five-fold pattern of creative work as laid out by Jim Jordan: taking something in hand (in this case, the Abrahamic family), restructuring it, distributing the product of labor,…
Gilder, George. Men and Marriage. Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2023. 1 By 1973, the hightide of second-wave feminism had flooded the beaches of American culture. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique eroded the shores of traditional female roles by naming and stirring up further domestic discontentment. Kate Millet wrote her dissertation-turned-book,…
The Book of Job is a very tortuous book. The arguments of Job and his friends are shot through with truth and error hopelessly mixed together. Every line of contentious poetry stands locked in deadly battle with every other line. As maddening as this can be for a reader who…
More than once in the last 50 years it has occurred to me that Paul might have known Jesus before He appeared to Paul on the Damascus road, but I had never taken up the notion in earnest until recently when I ran into a book by Stanley Porter titled…
The question in the title is genuine, not polemic. I could be perfectly happy to follow an ancient — and what is regarded as a well-attested — tradition. But I do not feel compelled to follow it simply because it is tradition. I would like to have arguments that Peter…
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It doesn't take long for a pastor to discover the discrepancy between need and resources in his ministry. Needs are infinite, or seem to be so. The pastor's resources of time, energy, and skill are radically limited. It's a dilemma, and one ripe for frustration, guilt, and burn-out. The pastor's…
In his recently-released Paul & the Gift , John Barclay argues that the concept of “grace” is multi-faceted and “susceptible to ‘perfection' (conceptual extension) in a number of different ways” (6). He takes the notion of “perfection” from Kenneth Burke, who describes it as the inclination to “draw out” a…
Erynn Masi de Casanova observes in her forthcoming Buttoned Up that since the surfeit of books on white collar conformism in the 1950s, “mainstream social science has largely ignored the world of white-collar work and the identities of the people who perform this work.” And in particular they have ignored…
Ross Douthat has recently observed that Trump's popularity is a sign that neither of the major parties represents the complexities of political opinion in the United States. No party and virtually no candidates are both pro-life and pro-Obamacare. But many citizens are both. This should be kept in mind during…
Donald Trump calls Jeb Bush a “nice” but “low energy” man. Whatever Bush does, Trump wins. Suppose Bush tries to get more energetic. That proves Trump was right, because Bush had to step it up. More, it keeps Trump in control, because Bush is dancing (more energetically) to Trump's tune.…
Wars are supposed to be moments to renew national solidarity, but Agnieszka Monnet argues that “all wars since WWII have been failures, as far as regenerating a collective sense of purpose and national cohesion is concerned: so-called successful ones, such as the Panama Invasion and Persian Gulf, as ineffective in…
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