Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
"The faithful use of sacraments, and indeed a fully sacramental view of creation, is vital to the life of the Church. Baptism and the Lord's Supper are rites that directly shape the community and the Body, because they were given by God for that express purpose. A deficient practice of…
Weightlessness is fun. At the beginning of Gravity (2013) , we can see one astronaut dancing the Macarena and another one playing with his jetpack. They like it out there in the space. Apart from zero-gravity they can enjoy beautiful views, and even the silence is likable, although Matt Kowalski…
I recently went to a lunch that is more or less quarterly. About a dozen of us go. It is a lunch held in honor of a retired professor of religion and philosophy. I have been one of his acquaintances for more than 40 years. In his tenure as professor,…
Why Theopolis? Don't we already have seminaries and Bible colleges and other institutions for theological education? Why do we need another one? I get this question now and again. I ask myself this question even more often. What follows is a partial answer. Back in the 1990s, seminaries seemed to…
I think the logic of the Lutheran Reformation can be summarized in one sentence, attributed to Luther himself: "God does not need your good works, but your neighbor does." The first half of that statement is justification by faith . God doesn't need our works to satisfy his justice or…
If you are looking to start a fight with Christians, there is hardly a better subject to do so than the arts. Music, movies, paintings, and literature have provided no small battlegrounds for Christians to war. We are emotionally invested in the arts. A song, a book, or a film…
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I made revisions to this essay on July 9, to correct my misleading summary of Hazony's position on the origins of nations . During World War I, writes Samuel Goldman ( After Nationalism ), German communities in the U.S. “were subjected to both official and unofficial harassment and violence.” Towns…
Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya, Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta, and Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff are heroes of the COVID-19 pandemic. Last October, they teamed up to write the Great Barrington Declaration that advocated “focused protection” of the vulnerable as an alternative to generalized lockdowns. They’ve faced relentless scorn, slander, and censorship ever since, yet…
Today’s battles over sex present, Douglas Farrow observes , “a curious sight.” Since Descartes and Rousseau, moderns have split body and soul, but that dualism has often underwritten a politics of mechanistic materialism. Now, though, the body has lost public relevance. Instead, “the body is private and the soul, or…
A few highlights from the readings for Kimbell Kornu’s Pentecost Term course on "The Christian Art of Dying," which we hosted at Theopolis in May. 1. Christians agree that sin is the ultimate cause of illness. But George Khushf suggests another dimension of the sin-sickness relation: Illness as “general revelation.”…
My WordPress dashboard tells me I've published 13,203 posts since I started blogging in 2004. If my posts average a mere 200 words, that's 2.6 million words. It could be twice that. I don't blog much anymore, but for the past several years, I've been writing a weekly newsletter, The…
Pentecost is the climax of our redemption, the fulfillment of our human destiny. Jesus isn’t done when He dies on the cross, and His work isn’t finished when He takes up His life again. He isn’t finished when He ascends to heaven. Jesus’ founding work of redemption isn’t done until…
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