Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Job appears in the Bible as a true story and it is regarded as such in other Scripture: As an example of suffering and patience, brothers, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord. Behold, we consider those blessed who remained steadfast. You have heard of the…
Thanksgiving is warfare. Gratitude is a weapon. Wield it well. Give thanks for the preparation. The hustle and bustle, the messy kitchen, the endless cleaning, the extra chairs, and stained tablecloths sing the song of hospitality. God desires that we prepare a place for friends and strangers, feasting and laughing,…
We often hear that, along with Leviticus, Ecclesiastes is the “most peculiar book,” lurking in the Bible’s back alley. 1 But it is high time that we retire this old dirge. God has concealed much gold here, therefore much glory is ours if we are careful to read Solomon’s wisdom…
1 Do you know when the mountain goats give birth? Do you observe the calving of the does? 2 Can you number the months that they fulfill, and do you know the time when they give birth? Job 39 We have and we do, Lord God. Spring is calving season.…
For six days work may be done, but on the seventh day you shall have a holy day, a Sabbath of complete rest to Yahweh. - Exodus 35:2 The instructions for building the tabernacle end with a Sabbath command and the narrative about building begins with a Sabbath command, before…
High in the list of now forgotten sins is simony. It was not always so: the medieval schoolmen believed simony to be the worst of ecclesiastical crimes and waged a centuries long campaign to purge the Church of this financial and spiritual corruption. As the schoolmen robustly defined it, “simony…
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In their editorial introduction to Globalizing the Sacred , Manual Vasquez and Marie Marquardt explain the limitations of secularization theory. Some secularization theorists, recognizing that the theory's universal claims have proven false, put forward a qualified secularization theory. Though secularization as such doesn't explain the progress of modernity, modernity does…
In a 2003 essay on Terrence Malick's film, Days of Heaven , Hubert Cohen traces the Edenic motifs in Malick's various films. At the beginning of The Thin Red Line , “Private Witt (Jim Caviezel) . . . is AWOL and living in a Melanesian community that he stubbornly insists…
In a recent Theopolis lecture, James Jordan pointed to the symmetry between the beginning and end of the Mosaic era. As soon as the tabernacle is set up, Aaron's two sons, Nadab and Abihu, offer foreign fire before the Lord and are killed. At the end of the Mosaic era,…
In a recent New Yorker piece on “ Omission ,” John McPhee puts in a word for concise writing. Inevitably, he quotes Hemingway: “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is…
Josh Timmermann suggests that Terrence Malick's To the Wonder takes its cues not from love stories but from love songs - one in particular, the Song of Songs: “Its narrative logic is specifically poetic. Its structure is built carefully upon a cadence of clear, beautiful rhymes and faint yet significant…
The Federal District court in the Kim Davis case concluded that requiring her to sign same-sex marriage licenses didn't violate her free exercise of religion. She still could do all those quaint things that religious people do: “Davis remains free to practice her Apostolic Christian beliefs. She may continue to…
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