Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Inspired by the “Moscow Mood” Debate In a shocking 1961 study, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram would don an official-looking white lab coat and tell a volunteer to administer increasing shocks to another “volunteer” in an adjacent room strapped into an “electric chair” just out of sight. The shocks were incrementally…
My title and the substance of the article are borrowed from a section of David Wenham’s excellent book, Paul: Follower of Jesus or Founder of Christianity? I am appropriating ideas from the pages in his book which address the question, “Why Does Paul refer to Jesus’ Life and Ministry so…
Some of us may be familiar with the notion that the epistle of James is like a New Testament version of Proverbs or other wisdom literature. According to this line of thinking, the epistle of James (together with the other wisdom literature) is basically a collection of timeless sayings without…
This summer I started walking a long trail that ran north from our home. On my best days, I would walk a total of five miles at a brisk pace. This trail follows the power lines that serve a significant portion of North Dallas and stretches far past the two…
I am an Australian. I went to the American Academy of Religion mega-fest last year to meet up with some friends, to present a paper at a ‘science and religion’ panel, and to marvel at the sheer scale of how Americans do things. It was quite a ride. Looking at…
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 We evangelicals do not often understand the roles of men and women in ministry. Because our consumerist culture has gutted the notion of family as it was historically understood, all Biblical passages about women in church ministry (a familial organism) are almost incomprehensible to…
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Beard envy is rampant, Serena Solomon reports , and some men are taking action: “The thick, flowing beards adorning hipsters from Williamsburg to Park Slope are driving follicly-challenged New Yorkers to a little-known but growing field of plastic surgery - facial hair transplants. Whether they’re filling in a few gaps…
FJA Hort offered a concise summary of the argument against dating Revelation in the reign of Domitian and for a Neronian date in his 1908 study of The Apocalypse of St John I-III . First, the negative case rests on a sense of the limits of the persecution of Domitian:…
“What do all these typographical high jinks signify?” asks Paul Muldoon about e. e. cummings’s poem about Buffalo Bill in a New Yorker review of Susan Cheever’s E. E. Cummings: A Life . Muldoon suggests several answers: “Perhaps the disregard for punctuation allows the reader a more active role in…
Marshall Poe notes in his TLS review that Catherine Merridale’s Red Fortress challenges the traditional statist interpretation of Russian history: “According to her, weak Russian leaders and their cronies concocted the statist theory - in various guises, at various times - simply to justify the consolidation and enhancement of their…
Jonathan Klawans charges ( Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple ) that Girard’s Violence and the Sacred is “nothing short of an indictment of sacrificial rituals” (22), which Girard finds “abhorrent” (23). Klawans thinks that Girard’s theory suffers from the same flaws as earlier theories from Robertson Smith and James Frazer.…
When the Philistines capture the ark, they think Dagon has defeated Yahweh. Yet Yahweh is a power worth deploying as a subordinate to Dagon, so that put the ark in Dagon’s temple (1 Samuel 5). Dagon apparently knows that he’s in the presence of the High God. Every morning, He…
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