Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Creationism is debated widely in the US, especially when it comes to teaching creation as an alternative theory of origins in public schools. Every few months, there’s another poll showing that many Americans still believe Ussher’s claim that the world was created around 4000 BC, which always elicits a contemptuous…
Walker Percy died in 1990, but his six published novels and his collections of essays are more relevant than when he wrote them. Percy was an American Dostoevsky, and that was no accident. “The European novels,” he says in a 1974 interview, “are more philosophical, more novels of ideas.” Dostoevsky,…
The Spirit is God’s agent for renewing the creation, for restoring bonds between nations, for knitting together people into the body of Christ. The Spirit is the renewer of the world, and the bond of all relations. That means that if you want your family to be knit together, if…
In their basic physical sense , the verbs translated as "persecute" in the Bible mean “chase” or “pursue,” and that fits the context quite naturally. As Pharaoh “pursued” (LXX, dioko ; Heb. radaph ) Israel into the wilderness, for example, so the dragon chases the woman back to her place…
Seng-Kong Tan’s Fullness Received and Returned is a densely argued, thoroughly researched, contextually sensitive study of participation in the soteriology of Jonathan Edwards. Along the way, Tan deals with many of the central themes in Edwards’s theology. As with many recent studies of Edwards, Tan’s monograph demonstrates both Edwards’s creativity…
The title of James Joyce’s first novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man indicates that it is a bildungsroman , a story of formation that describes the formative experiences of a poet who aspires to artistic greatness. The education described is Joyce’s own. The novel recounts the failing…
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Materialism is "good news," according to Stephen Greenblatt, since it shows us the truth of "human insignificance" and dispels enchantment. We're liberated from sacred boundaries to do what we like. Rusty Reno, who quotes this from Greenblatt ( Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society , 148) considers this a…
Paul Gottfried ( After Liberalism ) points out that liberalism doesn’t mean one thing. It “has not been allowed to keep any fixed and specific meaning. It has signified dramatically different and even opposed things at different times and places in the course of this century, from a defense of…
In his Lectures on Godmanhood , Vladimir Solovyev isolated the inner contradiction of 19th-century conceptions of human nature. On the one hand, "contemporary man is aware that he is internally free, deems himself to be higher than any external principle independent of him, asserts himself as the center of everything."…
Many commentators have noted the similarities between Josiah's death (2 Chronicles 35) and that of Ahab (2 Chronicles 18). Christine Mitchell argues, however, that commentators often miss the irony of the Chronicler's account, and some of the other precedents for Josiah's death. One irony has to do with the location…
Robert Heimburger's God and the Illegal Alien is a careful, theologically-informed treatment of American immigration law. He provides detailed overviews of the development of immigration law, including the origins of the concept of a legal "alien," sketches a theology of politics with the help of "Barth's biblical theology of the…
In his monograph on Aliens in Medieval Law , Keechang Kim notes that the distinction of citizen and "alien" replaced the earlier binary of "free" and "unfree" during the later middle ages. He cites John Fortescue's De laudibus legum Anglie (c. 1468-70), which argued that ""Hard and unjust (crudelis), we…
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