Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
This year’s Biblical Horizons conference was another great success and we would like to thank all those who were involved by helping out with the catering or opening up their homes to attendees and speakers. The talks, open-ended as they were, offered a fresh perspective and food for thought on…
I find myself often rehearsing conversations with my children. When the house is quiet in the late evening, and I'm standing in front of a pile of soapy dishes, I think about what I am going to say to them in certain situations. When I am driving in the car,…
In Matthew 24:29 , Jesus employs “cosmic language,” signs in the sun, moon and stars, to predict the imminent end of the Old Covenant. His first-century audience would have recognized His allusion to the prophecy against Babylon in Isaiah 13 and understood His discourse as a condemnation of Jerusalem as…
The Enthroned One speaks to John (Revelation 21:6): “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give to the one who thirsts from the spring of the water of life without cost.” It's a little theology proper. For starters, there's the Greek version of…
In reading about how we got into this mess, I came across a very interesting couple of paragraphs that I think the church could learn from if we are going to counter the Obergefell ruling. Prior to 2009, same sex “marriage” had gone to the ballot box thirty-one times in…
In my previous essay on Macbeth , I pointed out that Shakespeare rewrote Scottish history to construct a play which points to Adam’s Fall — a man and a woman tempted by devils to steal the throne and become like gods. It is hard to imagine anyone in Shakespeare’s day…
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Continuing through Simon Critchley’s book on Continental philosophy, the following analogy seems to capture some aspects of the contrast of Continental and analytic: Continental is Catholic: conscious of tradition, respectful of saints, aware of historical contextualization. Philosophy is the history of philosophy. Analytic is Protestant: deals with de-contextualized philosophical problems,…
Postmodern critics of modernity sometimes treat the latter not only as the pursuit and ambition for totality; they treat it as a totality, as an undifferentiated whole. But if postmoderns are right, even modernity was fragmented and frayed at the edges, and the appearance of totality is a modernist ruse.…
A subsidiary thesis: Modernity is motivated by a desire for purity, by dirt-avoidance - dirt being, as Mary Douglas says, “matter out of place.” Counter-modernity is dirt’s revenge, celebration of dirt.
Featherstone once again. He points out that sometime in the 18th century, upper class culture divided from lower class culture: “in 1500 the educated strata despised the common people although they shared their culture. Yet by 1800 their descendants had ceased to join spontaneously in popular culture and were rediscovering…
In his 1987 book, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism , C. Campbell attempts to explain the origins of contemporary obsession with novelty, pleasure in the new, self-expression through consumption of goods. He traces it to romanticism’s focus on “imagination, fantasy, mysticism, creativity and emotional exploration” (Featherstone’s…
A couple of further notes from Featherstone’s very stimulating book. First, citing Pierre Bourdieu, he notes the limits of seeing consumption as an isolated marker of status. The signs “that betray a person’s origins and trajectory through life are manifest in body shape, size, weight, stance, walk, demeanour, tone of…
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