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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Tim Parks offers this depressingly familiar description of what it’s like to read today . “Every moment of serious reading has to be fought for, planned for. Already by the late 1990s, translating on computer with frequent connections (back then through a dial-up modem) to check email, I realized that…
Andrew Shepherd travels some ways with Levinas and Derrida in his The Gift of the Other , but like other critics he finds that Derrida and Levinas cannot finally support their ethic of hospitality and welcome. He cites David Wood’s criticism that Derrida’s notion of unrestricted, unbounded hospitality smacks of…
According to Eric Costanzo’s study of John Chrysostom’s theology of alms ( Harbor for the Poor ), John considered the judgment scene of Matthew 25 as “this sweetest passage” concerning God’s role in almsgiving and the place of alms in the church. Costanzo writes, “John used this text to illustrate…
Robin Parry’s Worshipping Trinity , now in its second edition, is a solid overview of Trinitarian theology and its implications for worship. He opens with an overview of the Trinity in Scripture and sums of Christian orthodoxy before turning to liturgical questions per se - to Trinity in prayer, song,…
Daniel Lewis goes bird watching, and bird watchers need to know their colors. Lewis is also an historian, so he got interested in how color terms came to be standardized. The work of another bird-watcher was decisive: “Other important color dictionaries were published at the start of the 20th century…
Partly based on the association of “Satan” with accusation in Revelation 12:10, commentators have widely taken the Hebrew word to mean “accuser” or “prosecuting attorney” throughout the Hebrew Bible. In a recent essay in JBL , Ryan Stokes questions that conclusion. Instead, he claims that the word means “adversary” and…
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