Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Thus says the Lord: “A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are no more” (Jer 31:15). The Night of the Hunter belongs on every Christian’s Christmas list. My family has even…
One important part of Jesus's birth narrative is the presence of angels. The angel Gabriel appeared to the Virgin Mary, announcing that she would bear a son. And then, on the night Jesus was born, a whole host of angels appeared to the shepherds. Angels are mysterious creatures to us.…
I was settled nicely into my chair and listening to the conversation in an undergrad religion seminar, my last required course to graduate. Though a few Christians sat scattered around the room, the course itself was dedicated to poking holes in traditional understandings of the Bible: our readings deconstructed notions…
God’s symbols belong to Him and to His people. They are constantly at work in the world, including the world of film, music, painting, architecture, and other artforms. You cannot escape God’s symbols or the meaning He has woven into the created order. Artists use and borrow God’s symbols, whether…
For centuries, Christians identified Israel in the Old Testament as a single, literal ethnic group, often called “the Jews.” Even supersessionists – those who believed the Church superseded Israel – assumed the clear-cut, technical definition of “Israel” in the Bible is the ethnic group. However, a deeper dive into Genesis,…
Misreading Intent In the opening verses of Matthew 11, the reader is confronted immediately by John the baptizer who has been imprisoned since 4:12. John poses a question to Jesus, inquiring from prison as to whether or not he is Israel’s awaited Messiah or if they should anticipate another: “Are…
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Someone asked me recently about my views on church and state. I replied that I advocate a "Christendom model" of church-state relations. Then I proceeded to qualify. When I was done qualifying, I suddenly wondered whether what I call "Christendom" corresponds to what other people understand by the word. It…
Ezra begins where 2 Chronicles ends, with the decree of Cyrus. Some scholars have argued that the repetition indicates that the books were once united. It's said that the doubling is an ancient literary device to knot together two sections of a text. Whether that is the case or not,…
James Simpson briefly reviews the career of the 17th-century iconoclast William Dowsing in his history of iconoclasm, Under the Hammer . What motivated Dowsing, he argues, wasn't an effort to prioritize the word over the image, but a quest for "jurisdictional clarity." With the triumph of Parliament, the complex jurisdictional…
The key question regarding Freud, says Rosenstock-Huessy ( In the Cross of Reality , 266), is "Whom did Freud obey when he began to develop his theory?" The question arises because "in Freud's relational system there is no place for Sigmund Freud's own experience." He shares this distinction of an…
Alexandra Schwartz's New Yorker essay on self-improvement movements ( "Improving Ourselves to Death" ) starts out breezily enough, but it turns grim pretty fast. The "death" in her title isn't metaphorical. She summarizes the experiment of Carl Cederström and André Spicer, who tried to improve one area of their lives…
In a TLS review of Kontantin Barsht's Drawings and Calligraphy of Fyodor Dostoevsky , Robert Bird reminds us that Dostoevsky was a "trained draughtsman" who "thought in images no less than in words: "He wrote frequently about painting, and many of his key terms suggest visual, rather than verbal communication,…
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