Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I believe hymnals should be shorter than they are. Much shorter. 100 hymns at most, let’s say. I imagine that this will be a hard one to swallow for most of my readers, so I will attempt to bolster my argument as best I can. I can’t think of any…
Joshua is never called a king in the Bible. Yet while lacking the title, Joshua possesses the trappings of biblical kingship to a degree that it seems warranted to consider him a royal figure. There are lots of reasons for thinking this. In a 1981 Journal of Biblical Literature article,…
God speaks. He is not silent. He has designed humanity for reception of such communication and also to speak on His behalf. This speaking is not simply happenstance. It is not just a curious quirk about humanity. It is intrinsic to who we are that we speak and shape the…
One evening, years ago, home from college for Christmas break, I dreamt that I was playing the piano, passionately and well, in the church sanctuary beneath the parsonage in the renovated mansion in rural New Hampshire where my father was the minister. It was something of a lucid dream because…
I’m a big worrier. Always have been. Some of my earliest memories are of being anxious to the point of getting sick, sometimes for trivial reasons. My mind moves a million miles a minute, wondering what will happen in 5 minutes, or tomorrow, or next week, or in ten years.…
“The sun had gone up on the earth when Lot came to Zoar. And the LORD rained on Sodom and on Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the LORD from heaven, and he devastated those cities and the whole valley and all those dwelling in the cities and the growth of…
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Postmodern thinkers like Zygmunt Bauman have pointed to the “liquidity” of contemporary life, its shape-shifting instability. We have nothing on Bonaventure and other medieval doctors, for whom creation was a river flowing from a Triune source. Zachary Hayes ( The Gift of Being: A Theology of Creation (New Theology Studies)…
Over at The Guardian , Andrew Brown reports on the surprising strength of Calvinism in China. He cites Dr. May Tan of Singapore who predicts that Calvinism is becoming “an elite religion in China.” The reason, Tan says, is that Calvinism has a theology of resistance. Brown writes, “The great…
Peter Leithart is one of those exceptional teachers who instills not merely his knowledge in his students, but a bit of himself as well—his patient character, his charitable and jovial spirit, his boundless curiosity—so that they are never quite the same. He always acts as both a pastor and a…
In his Philosophy and Its Others (Suny Series in Systematic Philosophy) , William Desmond commends on the self-definition of clothing: “Clothes are not simply artificial protection against the unruly elements to compensate for bald bodies. They may define a kind of self, may communicate the color of a personal presence.…
In his essay “Violence and Metaphysics” in Writing and Difference , Derrida summarizes Levinas’s claim that metaphysics is a pursuit of totality, of totalizing explanations, that invariably involves conceptual and real violence. Being is not so because it “commands nothing or no one.” He elaborates: “As Being is not the…
In his fine treatment of Jacques Derrida: Live Theory , James K.A. Smith assesses Derrida’s debt to Marx. Despite owing a real debt, Smith notes that there is “a fundamental logic of dissociation at work in Derrida’s ‘spirit of Marxism’ whereby he distances himself from the doctrines and dogmatics of…
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