Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
This essay is adapted from my articles in Theopolis’s In Medias Res as a series of Holy Week meditations. Like many celebrities such as Kanye or Beyoncé or Adele, Josquin des Prez (d. 1521) was often known only by his first name, in his own time as now. “Josquin” is…
Sight is a major theme in the scriptures. The church has long identified sight’s relationship to the future fulfillment of the eschaton. As Paul says, “For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face” (1 Cor 13.12). Sight is associated with…
What is the chief end of man? —yes, to glorify God and enjoy him forever. But how ought man–and all creation–so glorify him? I propose a Theopolitan addition to the catechism, question and answer number 1.5, begun in the last question and answered as follows: Earth’s inhabitants were created to…
Naphtali is a hind let loose: he giveth goodly words. Genesis 49:21 Frederick Buechner once said, “We move into the extraordinary by way of the ordinary.” In poetry, this happens by way of a compressed code of analogs; often, two or more very ordinary things begin to reveal something that…
The evangelical milieu of America has often lost a vision of the fruit of repentance. We tend to simplify repentance by asking for forgiveness. After all, Jesus tells Peter to forgive 70 times 7. This verse must be paired with Paul’s scoffing at the question: why not sin more so…
I. The hemorrhaging woman. En route to Jairus’ house, Jesus is touched by a woman with a hemorrhage of blood (Matt 9:18–26; Mk 5:21–34; Lk 8:40–48). The story is one that many of us know very well. She has been yoked to her illness for twelve years, all of her…
Showing page 7 of 309
Showing page 8 of 43
From an article by Anselm Min. “The three Persons are thus mutually internal in the unity and totality of the divine process, of which the Father is the originating principle, the Son the pluralizing, and the Spirit the reintegrating and unifying principle, and from which none could be separately considered.…
Robert Jenson writes, “the identity of Israel’s God, his difference from other gods, is precisely that Israel’s God is not eternal in the way other gods are, not God in the same way.  That the past guarantees the future is exactly the deity of the gods, but Yahweh always challenges…
Consider the birds, Jesus said.  And the lilies. Solomon had: “How beautiful you are, my darling, how beautiful you are!  Your eyes are doves” and “Like a lily among the thorns, so is my darling among the daughters.” Jesus assures us that our Father feeds and clothes us.  He might…
Hegel wants to rebut the Enlightenment dismissal of Christianity.  He doesn’t do this by reaching back to pre-critical forms of faith, but by ingesting criticism, deconstructing traditional theology, and reconstructing what he claims is a purer form of faith.  Rowan Williams captures the reconstructive process very concisely: “from the fundamental…
It is not good for man to be alone.  Hegel says, It is impossible. “I have my self-consciousness not in myself but in the other.  I am satisfied and have peace with myself only in this other - and I am only because I have peace with myself; if I…
Summarizing “logic and spirit” in Hegel, Rowan Williams describes the pressure toward relationality that is inherent in any act of thought: “We think in relation to particulars; but we cannot, quite strictly cannot, think particulars simply as particulars, because we can’t concretely think a pure self-identity.  To think a particular…
Showing page 1339 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
