Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
What is below is fairly self-explanatory. This is an exchange I had with a local liberal clergyman on the subject of abortion. The circumstances of the debate are included in the text itself. I initially e-mailed this out to a list of clergy in our city after a local (and…
The seemingly humdrum parts of the Bible often hide overlooked wisdom. Take, for example, the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. Their stories aren't exactly the most gripping or memorable. They are far less concrete than, say, the story of the Exodus. No one in Ezra is stricken blind or devoured…
For most of the past century, philosophical perspectives on life in the western world have been overtly grim and pessimistic. The optimism of the Enlightenment, generated by confidence in the scientific method and the potential of an increasingly civilized humanity to redress the evils of the world, was shattered by…
Chiastic structures are found all over the Bible, and in recent decades commentators have become more adept at spotting them. But identifying these literary structures is only part of the challenge. There remains the challenge of understanding what they mean. Part of the answer is found in the recognition that…
Part 1 can be found HERE . Clearly, more than just getting worship right is important in changing the world, but since worship is the central act of God’s people, performed on the first day of the week at the center of the world before the very face of God,…
“Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts at which you nursed.” ( Luke 11:27 ) Arguing for Christian morality in a secular society is difficult. A culture which accepts evolutionary dogma has no intellectual place — or inherent desire — for absolute morality, since it believes morality…
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W alter McDougall ( Promised Land, Crusader State , 4–5) divides the history of American foreign affairs into two testaments, summarized by the two phrases of the title. “Our Old Testament dominated the rhetoric and, for the most part, the practice of U.S. diplomacy from 1776 to the 1890s, and…
I n her TLS review of new books about Jane Austen, Devoney Looser comments on the irony that we think of Austen as a truthful, i.e., “factual,” novelist, a reporter of life as it was. In fact, “Austen's writings rarely fetishize facts. Her early foray into history writing famously describes…
T he Economist summarizes the notion of “information asymmetry” pioneered by George Akerlof and others. Using a used car lot a setting for a thought experiment, Akerlof showed (in a paper published in 1978) that the information asymmetry between buyers and sellers kills the market. Sellers can tell the good…
T he Wire is the best TV series I've ever seen. Also among the raunchiest. In an aside in an eccentric piece comparing the Fairie Queene to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit , Cambridge English scholar Joe Moshenska sketches an even more eccentric comparison of Spencer's poem to The Wire :…
L ike all right-thinking Americans, Emily Nussbaum is suitably horrified by Trump's election. But she grasps his appeal better than most. He won by being a better stand-up comic and shrugging off criticism by claiming he was just joking: “Trump was a hot comic, a classic Howard Stern guest. He…
I n her study of postmodern apocalypticism, Apocalyptic Transformation (xxiii–xxv), Elizabeth Rosen asks what effects secularization has on apocalyptic stories. The most obvious thing is a change in “how the deity is portrayed.” The perfect God of traditional theism is out; “secular deities are often imperfect characters, neither absolutely omniscient…
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