Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In Infantilised: How Our Culture Killed Adulthood (2024), Keith Hayward says that we live in a “therapy culture.” This is “a way of thinking” about upbringing and education “when the values and language of counseling and psychotherapy break out from the clinical setting and take hold within the cultural imagination…
In Genesis 20:13, Abraham reveals that when he and his wife left their father’s house, he asked Sarah to call him her brother, not her husband. Abraham looked ahead to the land before them, a land full of violence, and he didn’t trust men there. He believed they would see…
Introduction I am sitting in a rural village in the northern part of a West African country. I’m in the courtyard of an imam. Two other Christians are with me. It’s hot and dusty, but we have come to read Scripture and talk together. As a local Christian takes the…
This is the wey to al good aventure; Be glad, thou reder, and thy sorwe of-caste -Geoffrey Chaucer, The Parlement of Foulys, 131–132 In January I had the honor and delight of speaking at the Church of the Redeemer’s 2025 Christendom Lectures. What follows are drawn from the notes for…
I had often heard that wisdom is visible in the countenance and I thought that I had seen examples of it in the past. But the man who stood before me, loosely holding the reins of the mare and peering around him with sharp interest, gave no outward hint of…
And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light — 1 Corinthians 11:14 In Revelation 5:2, the first of three “Mighty Angels” appears before the throne of God and preaches in a great voice, asking, “Who is worthy to open the book, and to loose the…
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That’s Barthes not Barth. As in Roland. Prickett suggests that Barthes’ proclamation of the death of the author, his manumission of interpretation from the obsession with the limited, final, “secret” meaning, and his hope for a liberated “anti-theological” and “revolutionary” reading that refuses “to fix meaning” in fact opens the…
Poststructuralism likes to think itself radical, but Stephen Prickett (Words and the Word) points out that it excludes the possibility of novelty. Barthes says that a text is “a tissue of quotations drawn from the unnumerable centres of culture.” And Kristeva’s notion of intertextuality, on Prickett’s reading, encloses a text…
A few highlights from James Wood’s chapter on language in How Fiction Works . Early on, he mentions the “old modernist hope” that prose can be “as well written as poetry.” This will require readers and novelists to develop what Nietzsche called a “third ear”: “We have to read musically,…
Lewis remarks on the high difficulty of adverse criticism, noting that the difficulty lies partly in the fact that the defects of bad literature are found in good literature: “The novel before you is bad - a transparent compensatory fantasy projected by a poor, plain woman, erotically starving. Yes, but…
Lewis describes the process by which words that once expressed and aroused emotions by appealing to the imagination have been emptied of image-content and become purely emotional. “Damn you” used to be a real curse, because people believed in damnation. Now that fewer do, it’s a more or less purely…
In Lewis’s defense, he is trying to explain some of the limits of language, which are worth noting (this in the last chapter of Studies in Words ). One limitation has to do with language’s inability “to inform us about complex physical shapes and movements. Hence descriptions of such things…
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