Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
When Jesus says in the farewell discourse that his disciples know the way to where He is going, Thomas replies: “We do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus answers Thomas, but He gives Thomas more than he asked : “I am the way,…
Through the pandemic we learned a lot about infections, how to catch them, what’s contagious, how to protect yourself from getting the infection. I learned a lot of new terms, like “social distancing,” “ppe” (personal protective equipment), N95 masks, and so on. We’ve seen that people are willing to go…
In Genesis 9:20, Noah is called “a man of the soil”. This phrase is a bit of a shock in the Hebrew; though it’s made up of two very common words - 'ish is “man” and 'adamah is “soil” or “ground” - these two words are never used together before…
Harold Bloom’s discussion of Twelfth Night in his Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is, as would be expected, insightful. It displays his deep love of poetry, and includes some truly eloquent descriptions of Orsino: “that sublimely outrageous lover of love” and “amiable erotic lunacy.” Bloom is worth reading just…
There have been times when Evangelicals, in an attempt to be clear about the errors of Rome and Constantinople concerning Mary, have been so denigrating of the mother of our Lord that they sounded more like cut and pasted lines from the Babylonian Talmud than they did disciples of Mary’s…
Awe is the phenomena experienced when one looks up and lights upon the height, majesty, and mystery of the California Redwoods. It appears the trees pierce heaven itself. Among these giant organisms are the Sequoia–while they are shorter in form, they reserve a width that spans an automobile. These trees…
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The church’s stance with regard to civil order is neatly articulated in Romans, provided we read chapters 12-13 together. Romans 13 makes it clear that God has given rulers the sword, and that they are to use it for just vengeance. They bear the sword to punish evildoers and to…
D espite its claims to the contrary, Patrick Deneen writes in a 2014 piece in The American Conservative , “liberalism was never about ‘limited' government” or curbing absolutism. Rather, liberalism is about “the pursuit and exercise of potentially limitless power toward seemingly ‘limited' ends of securing Rights.” The limitation on…
I n David's final speech (1 Chronicles 29), he offers a fivefold praise of God's perfections (v. 11): Yours is . . . 1. Greatness ( gedolah ) 2. Power ( giburah , related to gibbor , “mighty man”) 3. Glory 4. Victory 5. Majesty He adds an expansive note…
P atrick Murray's essay in Culmination of Capital lays out sixfold aim of Marx's Capital : to present and examine in the form of a systematic dialectic the social forms constitutive of the capitalist order, beginning with the (generalized) commodity; to expose capitalist society, in its enlightened secularism, to be…
I n the Divine Institutes , Lactantius takes on Plato's endorsement of common property. He makes a grudging admission that it might be “supported so long as it appears to refer only to money.” After all, “everyone should be wise enough to despise money!” (translation from From Irenaeus to Grotius…
“W e dismiss what philosophers take to be the fundamental exercise of justice,” writes Ambrose in his Christianized Ciceronian treatise de officiis (translation, F rom Irenaeus to Grotius , 84-5). According to Ambrose's summary, philosophical justice takes as “the primary criterion . . . that we do no harm except…
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