Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Creationism is debated widely in the US, especially when it comes to teaching creation as an alternative theory of origins in public schools. Every few months, there’s another poll showing that many Americans still believe Ussher’s claim that the world was created around 4000 BC, which always elicits a contemptuous…
Walker Percy died in 1990, but his six published novels and his collections of essays are more relevant than when he wrote them. Percy was an American Dostoevsky, and that was no accident. “The European novels,” he says in a 1974 interview, “are more philosophical, more novels of ideas.” Dostoevsky,…
The Spirit is God’s agent for renewing the creation, for restoring bonds between nations, for knitting together people into the body of Christ. The Spirit is the renewer of the world, and the bond of all relations. That means that if you want your family to be knit together, if…
In their basic physical sense , the verbs translated as "persecute" in the Bible mean “chase” or “pursue,” and that fits the context quite naturally. As Pharaoh “pursued” (LXX, dioko ; Heb. radaph ) Israel into the wilderness, for example, so the dragon chases the woman back to her place…
Seng-Kong Tan’s Fullness Received and Returned is a densely argued, thoroughly researched, contextually sensitive study of participation in the soteriology of Jonathan Edwards. Along the way, Tan deals with many of the central themes in Edwards’s theology. As with many recent studies of Edwards, Tan’s monograph demonstrates both Edwards’s creativity…
The title of James Joyce’s first novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man indicates that it is a bildungsroman , a story of formation that describes the formative experiences of a poet who aspires to artistic greatness. The education described is Joyce’s own. The novel recounts the failing…
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I n his Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society , Rusty Reno finds a “false view of freedom as unimpeded choice and self-definition” at the root of many of our political, economic, and social pathologies. In the name of freedom, we have “deregulated” culture, a policy shift with far…
R usty Reno ( Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society ) summarizes the findings of Charles Murray's 2013 Coming Apart . Murray compares two statistical cohorts - an upper class one that he labels Belmont and a working class cohort called Fishtown. He finds a growing gap not only…
N ear the beginning of his Divine Simplicity (xviii-xix), Paul Hinlickey briefly explains the differences between his “weak” account of simplicity and the “strong” accounts of Thomas and others. In many classic treatments, simplicity is “a rationally evident ontological implication that comes about by analysis of the ground of a…
T he best anthropologists are specialists in difference. They operate on the assumption of distance between the anthropologist and the object of study. The great anthropological sin is to incorporate the different into a variation of the same, to impose the anthropologist's social, philosophical, religious, or political categories on a…
S ome of the freshest commentary on the 2016 Presidential election has been coming from Dilbert creator Scott Adams. Adams has endorsed Clinton, as he says, “for my own personal safety,” but he has also stated that he doesn't vote. He wants to maintain objective distance from the fray, and…
L uke Timothy Johnson's critique of John Paul II's theology of the body isn't convincing. He complains about the way the Pope uses Scripture, moving from text to exhortation in an “uncritical” way, and failing to rise to the level of “serious theological engagement” ( The Revelatory Body , 25).…
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