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…
Showing page 55 of 309
Showing page 7 of 43
In Rune 40 of the Finnish epic, Kalevala , the hero, Wainamoinen, is sailing with his friends to Pohjola, where he intends to recover the Sampo, a talisman of good luck and extraordinary, mysterious power. No one today quite knows what the Sampo was, but many of the episodes of…
Chaucer, like Shakespeare after him, set some of his poems in ancient Greece. The “Knight's Tale” takes place in Athens, ruled by the same “Duke” Theseus who rules Athens in Midsummer Nights Dream . Troilus and Cresyde is a Trojan love tragedy. Neither of these works, however, shows much deep…
According to C. S. Lewis ( English Literature in the Sixteenth Century , 27-28), English humanists were most interested in style, but the style was mostly Latin: “Greek was given abundance of ‘mouth honor,’ but only the minor Greek authors (Plutarch, Heliodrous, Chilles Tatius, the Anthology) were really relished. Greek…
Emily, the lady-love of Chaucer's “Knight's Tale,” the first of the Canterbury Tales, appears in a garden, and the poet describes her as if where were part of the garden. She is Eve in Eden. But this is no Edenic world. The men who see her are locked out of…
Tragic stories are fall stories. Whether through moral wrong or through some inadvertent hamartia , the tragic hero falls from a high place. Others are engulfed in the tragedy to one extent or another, but not everyone. Those who watch can experience the catharsis of pity and fear by watching…
C S. Lewis describes the formation of medieval allegorism in his classic Allegory of Love . He begins by distinguishing between an allegorical and a sacramental or symbolic turn of mind. Allegory begins, he says, with “an immaterial fact, such as the passions which you actually experience” and finds ways…
Showing page 434 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
