Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
If you’re a preacher looking for good commentaries on Ezra, you’ll struggle. Certainly to find ones that wrestle in good detail with the text. And certainly ones that don’t cost you an arm and a leg. There’s a good bit more for Nehemiah, which is odd, as the two are…
Quick thought experiment: try to pretend you’ve never read 1 John before. Read 1:1-6. Go ahead; I’ll wait. Now, on to v. 7: “But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with ______….” What word would you expect in that blank, based…
In my work as a Bible translator, I was recently checking our translation team’s draft of Genesis 8:8, which says of Noah (translating the Hebrew quite literally): And he sent out the dove from with him to see: had the waters lessened from upon the face of the ground? Part…
Just in case a reader may not know Weinberg, he is a theoretical physicist and the winner of the Nobel prize in physics in 1979, as well as countless other prizes for his research. He is also a prolific, lucid, and captivating writer. If you want to read something on…
Colossians 1:15-20 is a famous passage in Paul’s epistles because it is a succinct and powerful poem. It appears even to have been a hymn. Given the uniquely Pauline language — “reconciliation” is a term used only by Paul — it should not seem odd to attribute the poem/hymn to…
Stalker (1979) is a film by Andrei Tarkovsky based on Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers. It shows a day from the life of a stalker, a man who enters the so-called "Zone", an Alien landing site, where he leads people to a room that grants people’s innermost desires, which…
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Motyl offers several responses to Ferguson’s advocacy of liberal empire as a way of spreading democratic institutions, capitalist economies, freedom, and Western culture. First, he notes that liberal empires that promote free trade and democracy might be tied to a particular historical moment: “it is an unwarranted leap in logic…
Alexander Motyl attempts to discern the definition of empire implicit in Niall Ferguson’s Empire : “ As Ferguson does not even bother to define the concept, at most we can surmise from his discussion of British and American power that empire entails ‘actually ruling a colony’ by means of ‘colonial…
INTRODUCTION Jesus’ curses against the scribes and Pharisees climax in a lament over the doomed city of Jerusalem . He has tried to gather her to Himself, but she has refused. Like Yahweh in the days of Ezekiel (chs. 8-11), Jesus abandons the temple (Matthew 24:1). THE TEXT “Woe to…
James says that true religion consists in “visiting widows and orphans in their distress” (James 1:27). We don’t get the point if we think of “visit” in our first sense of “pay a call.” In Christ, God has “visited and redeemed His people” (Luke 1:68), and the dayspring from on…
Nathan Kerr ( Christ, History, Apocalyptic ) explains Yoder’s notion of Jesus’ “independence” by saying that Jesus “lives, concretely and in history, a life-story that is entirely free from and irreducible to any pre-given ‘historical’ coordinates, any general or ‘meta’ principle that might serve to range the complexities and contingencies…
Jesus’ image of the Pharisees as “white-washed graves” is multi-dimensional. First, there is the obvious contrast between the apparently pure outside (white) and the inside (bones and uncleanness). In context, the Pharisees have become filled with corpses by devouring other Jews. They are cannibals, insatiable as the grave. Second, as…
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