Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto Me. In 2005, God blessed our family with our third child, our second daughter, whom we named Bethany. As soon as Bethany was born, we knew there was something different about her. Unlike her two older siblings, who were born…
Christian, what is it that we believe? While Creeds like the Nicene and Apostle’s have been fundamental pieces of Christian liturgy and life, the American Church is highly unattached to these classic statements. From this creedal phobia has arisen the popular “No Creed, but Christ” slogan. Such slogan, of course,…
Revisiting William Cavanaugh’s devastating 2009 The Myth of Religious Violence . The myth of Cavanaugh’s title is a well-known one. According to the myth, religion is a distinct sphere of human life and practice from the rest of human social life, a universal impulse in human beings, and is dogmatic,…
19 Then the same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews, came Jesus and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you. 20 And when he had so…
An octave is a repetition, a repetition with a difference. It’s not the first note played again , but the first note played at a higher pitch. Octaves have always marked new beginnings. Hebrew boys were circumcised on the eighth day. Firstborn sheep were dedicated to Yahweh on the eighth…
We say Jesus’ resurrection is good news. It wasn’t good news for the disciples on the first Easter. More like perplexing, bewildering news. For others, it wasn’t perplexing, and it certainly wasn’t good. It was plain old bad news. Early in Luke’s gospel, Herod is terrified that Jesus might be…
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Oliver and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan pithily sum up Tertullian’s argument in De corona militis ( From Irenaeus to Grotius , 24): “By concentrating on the particular issue of whether a Christian should wear the military chaplet on ceremonial occasions, it manages to take for granted the more fundamental case against…
Command, Clement of Alexandria wrote, involved “caution, risk taking, and the union of the two,” and these expressed themselves in words, deeds, or word-deeds. Moses was the great model of command, not only to Israel but to the Greeks ( Stromateis , 1.24). Moses’ night march through the sea guided…
In his wise contribution to the Blackwell Companion to Political Theology , RR Reno concludes that Hauerwas’s theology is “a thoroughgoing Christian liberalism” (314). This isn’t a criticism or a charge of inconsistency. Reno knows that Hauerwas “he rejects the liberal ideal of critical detachment. We can never begin by…
Noah Kristula-Green responds to the politicization of the Lego Movie by, well, trying to score political points: “the film does play lip service to political tropes, but what really makes the film work is that it represents the highest form of capitalist expression: it is a commercial.” The film resists…
Putin is watching Ukraine carefully, writes Julia Ioffe , because he knows that what happens in Kiev could be replicated in Moscow: “Putin and the system he built do sweat the small things because Putin sees dissent as a slippery slope. He knows the cold has never stopped a single…
Jesus promises to make the victors in Philadelphia pillars in His temple, and to inscribe a triple name on them. Fill in the blank: “The name of My God, and the name of the ____________ of My God, which comes down out of heaven from My God, and My new…
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