Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I grew up on the north side of Chicago. My parents were evangelicals and I was raised in the faith. I graduated from a large public high school in which practicing Christians were very few and very far between (though nominal Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox were in abundance), which…
During the recent round table discussion on the future of Protestantism , Peter Leithart advocated a much greater degree of unity in the Church than we presently enjoy. Another participant in the discussion wondered aloud how Leithart's vision would be different from the ministerial associations that presently exist in many…
"But he, wanting to justify himself, said, 'And who is my neighbor?' And Jesus said to him, 'First, your neighbors are the people in your church, then the ones with whom you enjoy greatest doctrinal or ecclesiastical commonality, then those with whom you enjoy less commonality.'" -Said Jesus... never Since…
A number of years ago, I came across something in the Puritan Thomas Goodwin in regard to John 17:22. Goodwin points out that Jesus prays that they (the disciples) might be given the glory of the Father as a means to an end. The end is unity, and the means…
In her prize-winning book, Gilead , Marilynne Robinson uses the pastoral settings of Iowa to challenge ministers to live up to their high callings. One of the most powerful themes in the novel is the pastor’s power to “bless.” The tension in the novel builds as we watch Rev. Ames…
One of the few glaring errors of the Protestant Reformers was the failure to welcome children back to the Lord's Table. Something that seems to go along with this was the exclusion of other kinds of Christians, primarily Roman Catholics, from Holy Communion in Protestant churches. Exclusion of Roman Catholics…
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R. Taggart Murphy has been writing on Japanese politics, business and economics for a long time, but the rest of the world has lost interest. What fascinates, he says, is Japanese culture - the fashions, the anime, the weirdness of a country where you can pay 7000 yen to be…
Senator Robert Kennedy was shot on June 5, 1968. The next day, Veronica Lueken of Bayside, New York, was praying to St. Therese of Lisieux for Kennedy when she was surrounded by the fragrance of roses. Over the next months, she began writing poetry that she later attributed to St.…
Over at the Trinity House site , I analyze the sevenfold description of Israel’s “good land” in Deuteronomy 8.
In a 2010 article in the Journal for the Society of Christian Ethics , natural law theorist Jean Porter probed the question of same-sex marriage, and concluded that there were no objections in natural law to same-sex sex or to same-sex marriage as such. The article is excerpted here .…
Epistemology has often been viewed as a debate between raitonalists and empiricists. Descartes set certainty as the gold standard of knowledge, and argued from doubt to conclusions that he considered indubitable. Empiricists insist that our senses are capable of giving us reliable knowledge of the world, and in many cases…
Matthew Easter summarizes the back-and-forth of the arguments in the debate over pistis Christou. It’s a careful, judicious summary, and his conclusion seems irrefutable: The debate won’t be resolved by grammar alone, since “interpreters resort either intentionally or unintentionally to their larger models for reading Paul that are already in…
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