Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
If you’re a preacher looking for good commentaries on Ezra, you’ll struggle. Certainly to find ones that wrestle in good detail with the text. And certainly ones that don’t cost you an arm and a leg. There’s a good bit more for Nehemiah, which is odd, as the two are…
Quick thought experiment: try to pretend you’ve never read 1 John before. Read 1:1-6. Go ahead; I’ll wait. Now, on to v. 7: “But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with ______….” What word would you expect in that blank, based…
In my work as a Bible translator, I was recently checking our translation team’s draft of Genesis 8:8, which says of Noah (translating the Hebrew quite literally): And he sent out the dove from with him to see: had the waters lessened from upon the face of the ground? Part…
Just in case a reader may not know Weinberg, he is a theoretical physicist and the winner of the Nobel prize in physics in 1979, as well as countless other prizes for his research. He is also a prolific, lucid, and captivating writer. If you want to read something on…
Colossians 1:15-20 is a famous passage in Paul’s epistles because it is a succinct and powerful poem. It appears even to have been a hymn. Given the uniquely Pauline language — “reconciliation” is a term used only by Paul — it should not seem odd to attribute the poem/hymn to…
Stalker (1979) is a film by Andrei Tarkovsky based on Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers. It shows a day from the life of a stalker, a man who enters the so-called "Zone", an Alien landing site, where he leads people to a room that grants people’s innermost desires, which…
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Matthew Levering has a couple of brilliant pages on Aquinas’s discussion of how Christ’s sacrificial obedience to the Father restores justice in the world ( Christ’s Fulfillment of Torah and Temple ). First, Thomas emphasizes the uniqueness of Israel’s law, which don’t simply aim, as human law order does, at…
How does de Lubac’s interest in nature/grace fit into his ecclesiological concerns? It might seem that his effort to integrate nature and grace could support the juridical notion of the church expressed in Vatican I. Operating on a strict nature/supernatural distinction, one might see the church as an “invisible” body…
James Carroll’s account of Constantine ( Constantine’s Sword ) is riddled with half-truths and distortions. He’s not nearly as bad as Dan Brown, but he’s bad. But the howler (thus far) is this: Christians had tried to work out how Jesus is God without coming to a consensus, but what…
Obama may be just as dangerous as some of my friends say he is. He certainly will do all he can to re-secure abortion rights, advance gay rights, enact counter-productive legislation on health care. His goals are all the more worrisome given the executive powers he inherits from the Bush…
Betz sharply, and rightly, dismisses Berlin’s suggestion that Hamann’s “irrationalism” is the deep source of National Socialism: “let is be stated at the outset that Hamann was a friend of the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn; that he denounces the persecution of the Jews; that he called Judaism the ‘bodily mother…
Why does Hamann write so “darkly”? Betz suggests that in part “it should be seen as a calculated attempt to show up the Aufklarer , i.e., to show that they are not as bright as they think, indeed, to force upon them a confession of ignorance, in order that they…
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