Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
G.K. Chesterton assumes a surprising and memorable perspective from which to view the events of Palm Sunday (Matthew 21:1-11) The Donkey by: G.K. Chesterton When fishes flew and forests walked And figs grew upon thorn, Some moment when the moon was blood Then surely I was born. With monstrous head…
There is a common biblical principle: you must give back what you steal. In the Bible, restitution is repayment with interest. If you rob someone of their money, you have to pay back double what you stole. A thief must pay back fourfold if he steals a sheep, and if…
Identifying Isaiah’s suffering servant with the promised Messiah is unthinkable for a Jew because it combines the offices of humble priest and victorious king. While it is frustrating that Jews refuse to see the sufferings of Christ in Isaiah 53, the reluctance of Christians to interpret the passage in its…
Let everything that has breath praise the Lord! Praise the Lord! Psalm 150:6 (ESV) The command to praise God is pervasive throughout Scripture. In the verse above the Spirit calls all things with breath to praise the Lord. Song is also clearly featured all throughout Scripture and is a featured…
“Gender is a social construct.” That’s shocking to people who have assumed that gender and sex were synonyms but at least since I was in college, in the ‘80s, we were taught that “gender” refers to the forms, the customs, the traditions that our culture teaches us to define what…
In Genesis 49, Jacob prophesies about (blesses and curses?) his twelve sons. The first three of them don’t fare well. Jacob recalls Reuben’s offense of taking his concubine (Genesis 35:22) and the murderous violence of Simeon’s and Levi against the Canaanite inhabitants of the city of Shechem (Genesis 34). He…
Showing page 45 of 309
Showing page 7 of 43
Stephen Mansfield remembers what Kurdistan was like in the early 1990s: “To be among the Kurds in the northern Iraq of those days was to be in the middle of a civil war while the troops of a tyrant amassed on a nearby border. Economic sanctions added to the general…
Rejoice when you are persecuted, Jesus tells His disciples, “for in the same way they persecuted ( dioko ) the prophets who were before you” (Matthew 5:10-12). Which prophets were those? The only prophet to speak directly of being persecuted is Jeremiah, who prays that those who persecute (LXX dioko…
Responding to a recent post on superheroes, a friend pointed me to this , where Betsy Phillips points out that Superman was invented by two Jews and modeled on Moses. Phillips writes: “Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster weren’t patterning Superman after Jesus. They were patterning him after Moses. A woman…
Haydn White argued that historical writing was disciplined as it moved from the sublime to the beautiful. As a result, modern historical writing is “domesticated” as it strips away all the tropes that lend themselves to the strange and terrifying possibilities of the sublime. In History and Tropology (15-16) F.…
Cherubim have four faces, similar to four creatures: ox, lion, eagle, man. In two passages in Daniel, all of these faces become faces of Babylon. When he falls from reason, Nebuchadnezzar pastures in the field like cattle, and his hair grows like eagle feathers (4:33). Three out of four: He…
At Politico , Nick Spencer argues that the possibility of atheism in the modern world, and the relative weakness of atheism in America, has less to do with science than with politics. Spencer writes, “‘Science’ - if we can treat that collection of disparate disciplines as one single, coherent enterprise…
Showing page 552 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
