Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The doctrine of justification is precious among Protestants. And it should be. The fact that God has declared our sins forgiven and that we have a righteous standing in the sight of God united to Christ is comforting and brings great joy. Unfortunately, the biblical teaching on justification is, many…
The Old Testament priests were given a number of seemingly disparate duties. As everyone knows, the priests led the sacrificial worship of Israel; only the priests could sprinkle blood on the altar or within the tabernacle, and only they could approach the altar to turn sacrificial animals into smoke. But…
M issional ecclesiology is all the rage these days, but for many being “missional” means downplaying or even eliminating concern for the “internal” life of the church, particularly its liturgical life. Missional and liturgical, mission and communio , are locked in zero-sum combat. That cannot be right. The liturgy is…
An old friend of mine, now passed into Heaven, started to say this in relationship to his sometimes troubled family, in the last quarter of his life, "I just had to take responsibility for the whole thing..." That was the seed for a new reading of the Gospel for me,…
She departed the port, dressed in her best ceremonial regalia, with tassels and flags fluttering from her mast and rigging. She stood tall, robed in mist, crowned in white, and backlit by the rising sun. There she sat, shimmering and spotless; with a perfect ragtop, and a full tank of…
John the Baptist is presented in the gospels as the fulfillment of the Old Testament promise that God would send His messenger to prepare the way for the coming of the glory of the Lord (Is. 40), and the promise to send Elijah before Him to turn the people to…
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Frederic Jameson’s Antinomies of Realism continues the argument he made a couple of decades ago in Signatures of the Visible . In that earlier book, Jameson argues that realism depended on “prolonging and preserving - rather than ‘resolving’ - [a] constitutive tension and incommensurability.” That tension is inherent in realism’s…
Duncan Kelly argues in his lengthy TLS review of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century that the “book is as much a story about the limits of modern democratic politics as it is about the structures of inequality.” That is not simply about the anti-democratic role that wealth plays…
Walter Brueggemann’s Sabbath As Resistance is, like most of Brueggemann’s other work, bracing and frustrating in equal measure. He rightly sees the Sabbath command in connection with the first commandment: Worshiping the God of the exodus means worshiping a God who delivers from the demanding, restless gods of Egypt and…
Justin McGuirk argues in his Radical Cities that Latin American was the site of the “greatest experiments in urban living of the twentieth century. Latin America, let us not forget, experienced mass urbanisation long before China and Africa, which today produce almost panic-inducing statistics of urban population growth. In the…
“Sensing that Africa had been cast aside by the West in the wake of the Cold War,” writes Howard French in China’s Second Continent , “Beijing saw the continent as a perfect proving ground for some Chinese companies to cut their teeth in international business.” That Africa is rich in…
Socrates’s discussion of purity in the Sophist treats the concept in a refined fashion. He admits the existence of bodily impurities, but his focus is on the mental impurities that need to be cleansed if someone is to escape the evils of ignorance and error. Benjamin Jowett provides this summary…
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