Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The resurrection stories in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are among the strangest stories in all of the literature of the world, even among the strangest stories in the Bible. That is true of each Gospel’s accounts individually, but even more of the collection as a whole. On the one…
As a pastor, I’m interested in discipleship. Christians are called to be disciples of our Lord Jesus Christ. Discipleship has everything to do with the disciplines we walk by in our lives. Things like Bible reading, prayer, and fasting are hallmarks of standard Christian discipleship. The basic thrust is that…
Psalm 1 is justly famous among biblical texts. It opens the Psalter, it’s a paean to the life-giving power of the Law, and it beautifully describes righteous life as a stable, fruitful tree. It subtly weaves the contrasting threads of wickedness and righteousness into a succinct summary of biblical wisdom:…
No book is more quoted in Hebrews than the Psalter: there are quotations and allusions to psalms on virtually every page. And many of the quotations are not passing references but closely considered and repeatedly cited as the author of Hebrews develops his central arguments. Much of Hebrews is exposition…
Howard Bloom is a beautiful hypocrite. The author of books in as different subjects as Mohammed, scientific theory, and the cultural upheaval of the 1960s, he professes to be a “stone cold atheist.” Yet in spite of that profession, Bloom obviously writes as a Jew; that is, he writes with…
There may be some debate about who deserves the title “the King of American literature,” but, at least to my mind, there should be no debate over who deserves to be “the Queen” – let’s give the crown to Flannery O’Connor. She is, however, a very unlikely queen. Unlikely, not…
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A llen Guelzo observes in his history of the Reformed Episcopal Church that historians of American Episcopalianism are misled by Anglo-Catholicism's success in establishing “their own vision of Episcopal history, as the single reigning view of the history of the Episcopal Church” (13). It is not, he says, a historical…
I n his The Undoing Project (205-8), quotes two lengthy passages from a 1972 lecture by Amos Tversky on “Historical Interpretation: Judgment Under Uncertainty.” Both describe how historians trick themselves into seeing inevitability: In the course of our personal and professional lives, we often run into situations that appear puzzling…
T wo test questions from Michael Lewis's The Undoing Project (184-5, 192-3). Q. In a family of six children, which birth order is more likely? BBBGGG or GBBGBG? A. Most say the latter, but they are equally probable, equally random. People have a mental model of “randomness,” and the second…
R eligion News Service reports on a Pew survey of the religious makeup of the 115th Congress: “Nearly 91 percent of members of the 115th Congress convening Tuesday (Jan. 3) describe themselves as Christian, compared to 95 percent of Congress members serving from 1961 to 1962, according to congressional data…
M ichael Lewis is the writer every writer wants to be. Every book since Liar's Poker has been a best-seller (30 years on, Liar's Poker is still a best-seller), several have been made into movies, and he writes clean, amusing, vivid, highly informative prose about some of the coolest things…
J oseph did not know his wife until she gave birth to a Son (Matthew 1:25). Why not? In Matthew’s account, the conception of Jesus is attributed to the “Holy Spirit” (1:20), and Luke makes it explicit that the one conceived by the Holy Spirit is Himself holy: “the holy…
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