Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
If 1 Chronicles were a movie, it would begin with two hours and forty-five minutes of credits: Name after name scrolling across the screen, most of them (as far as we’re concerned) obscurities and nonentities and unknowns, forgotten fathers and sons and mighty men; all the bit players in the…
Let me locate myself. I’m sitting on a sand dune, three hundred feet above the blue-as-a-swimmer-crab water of Lake Michigan. I’m so high above the surface that the sound of the waves flopping onto the beach is as quiet as wind easing through a screen door. Around me are several…
My title is too grand. What I offer here falls far short of a full description of poetry. I barely offer a definition. A more accurate title would be “Axioms and Suspicions About Poetry.” Axioms first. I have three of them. The first is the closest I can come to…
In his book In Defense of Food Michael Pollan does just what the title suggests, he defends food. Pollan argues that the presupposition behind modern food science, or “nutritionism” as he calls it, is that humans don’t need food, they need nutrients. To be sure, modern science is not yet…
The early church took possession of the Roman Empire within a few centuries, largely because she ministered sacrificially in word and deed. The church provided services and care that the empire and pagan religions could not in times of crisis. The faithful witness of those serving Christians bore great fruit…
My title, “The Original Murder” will be understood by many readers, if not almost all, to refer to Cain’s murder of Abel, but I have in mind the very first murder, the one which Jesus pointed to when He said that Satan was a murderer “from the beginning.” “You are…
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What hath Jerusalem to do with Athens? The worship of Greece with the worship of the temple? Quite a lot, in fact, argues David Biale in Blood and Belief (26): “Greek and Israelite sacrificial customs turn out to have been more similar to each other than the Israelite was to…
David Biale ( Blood and Belief ) argues that menstrual blood is not defiling because it is associated with death (as Jacob Milgrom, among others, argues). After all, menstrual blood doesn’t mean a woman is dying but that she is fertile. On the other hand, the sorts of bleeding that…
Durkheim said that “society” was the god to whom primitive peoples sacrificed, the totem standing in for the clan for which it served as totem. We might say, But of course. As FS Naiden ( Smoke Signals for the Gods , 277) has recently pointed out, by the time of…
John M. Lundquist argues that ancient temples were “associated with the realm of the dead, the underworld, the afterlife, the grave.” He states further: “The unifying feature here is the rites and worship of ancestors. The temple is the link between this world and the next. It has been called…
Paul says that everything that is in the light, everything that becomes visible, is light (Ephesians 5). He is writing about the light of the Father, Jesus, or the Spirit. If we are in that light, we ourselves become lights. But the claim is strictly true: Everything that the light…
John Lundquist claims that secrecy is one of the features of temples and temple rituals in the ancient world. All temples are sacred space, which means secret space, off-limits to any but the authorized. He cites Exodus 19:12-13, 21-24 in support. This is certainly true of ancient temples in general,…
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