Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Every advent of new media creates the justifiable reaction from some that the necessarily accompanied amputation may not be worth the extension made possible by the new tools. This is not unique to the Digital Age. Lamoignon Malesherbes, the French politician who was counsel for the defense of Louis XVI,…
A response to Gage Crowder's " The Hole in our Hope ?" Already, the first pages of the Bible promise a bright future. The story starts with the creation of heaven and earth, where heaven is perfect, but the earth is in a state of formless emptiness. Yet, God takes…
A rejoinder to Bubu Jarmulak's essay, " Embrace Pessimism ." Whereas calumnious critiques are reflections of more on the critic than the work criticized, good critiques are always opportunities for reassessment and improvement if they are received as such . Since its renaissance, the biblical doctrine of postmillennialism—or “optimistic eschatology,”…
Several decades ago, a pastor (and friend) mentioned in passing at one of our regular breakfasts together that he wasn’t satisfied with the usual reading of Jesus’s prayer in Gethsemane, the usual reading being that Jesus asked the Father to avoid the Cross at Gethsemane. We turned to the passage,…
On May 21, 1604, the cathedral of Toledo in Spain held job interviews for the post of choirmaster, the head of music at the church. The position had been vacated when the previous occupant, Alonso Lobo, was poached by the nearby cathedral of Seville, and Toledo needed a replacement who…
Imagine — counterfactually: on the night he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus held up an empty hand and said, ‘This is the blood of the covenant poured out for you. Drink of it.’ But there was no cup, no wine, nothing. If there’s no sign of the covenant, is there…
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Late at night in Lady Olivia’s great house in Illyrium, three friends – Sir Toby, the lady’s uncle, Feste her fool, and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, her hapless suitor – sing drunken songs that resound loudly through the empty halls. Malvolio, Lady Olivia’s stern steward and “something of a Puritan,” rises…
David Harvey ( Ways of the World ) describes our cultural moment in terms of “space-time compression,” and finds an analogy with the speed-up of life that was widely noted at the beginning of the twentieth century: “While historical analogies are always dangerous, I think it no accident that postmodern…
In her collection of essays on money, Slave of Two Masters , Melinda Selmys devotes several pages to the celebration of motherhood and its unique economics. Taking her cue from the curse of Genesis 3, she argues that men have always “lorded” over women by claiming all important human achievements…
The cry has come up from our national journalogians at the NYT and the Daily News : “God isn't fixing this. No more prayers. Let's get some action.” If God - the living God - were to get busy fixing things, they may not like the way He goes about…
As Robert Jenson has argued, the big question of religion is the question of eternity: How is God related to time? For Greco-Roman paganism and for the great religions of the far east, god or the gods are immune to time, alien to time. The whole point of Plato's forms…
Despite the distracting use of the opposition of of “authenticity” and “responsibility,” Terry Eagleton has some thoughtful observations on the tragic dilemma in Hamlet ( Shakespeare and Society , 1967). Hamlet’s is a society of “reciprocal human definitions,” that is to say, a man’s identity is mirrored to him by…
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