Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I am making a new rule in our house! We are actually kind of skimpy on the house rules. I try very hard to keep things simple: love God, love others, be joyful. It’s not complicated to avoid discipline here. But I have found myself repeating this new rule over…
Click HERE for Part 2 The voice of Jesus transforms and changes Mary when she hears him speak her name. This is her last “turning.” So also the woman in the Song of Songs longs to hear the voice of her beloved. Let me see your face, let me hear…
Click HERE for Part 1. The details of this story call the attentive reader back to the drama of Solomon’s Song of Songs. And the Song of Song’s alludes to, ties us into the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden and the promise of a coming Messiah that…
“The course was a paradigm shift for me,” said Jonathan Sedlak, a Milwaukee electrical contractor who attended Theopolis’s course on Revelation. “I am left with a book that is far more practical than it has ever seemed before.” Jonathan Anderson of Louisville, Kentucky found the course “refreshing.” “I finished with…
“It is only by participation in a rational, practice-based community that one becomes rational.” – Alasdair MacIntyre It may be perfectly clear to a chef why adding unsifted powdered sugar to a hot frosting is a bad idea. But for an amateur cook, this may be the kind of rule…
On a fresco in a chapel in Padua, Italy, there is a famous painting depicting the dramatic post-resurrection scene in John 20 with Mary and Jesus outside of the garden tomb. Giotto di Bondone painted it in the early 14th century. Jesus is striding from the tomb with a victor’s…
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A web summary of Lacan’s negative account of desire says, “In constructing our fantasy-version of reality, we establish coordinates for our desire; we situate both ourselves and our object of desire, as well as the relation between. As Slavoj Zizek puts it, ’ through fantasy, we learn how to desire’…
“I am my beloved’s, and his desire is for me,” says the bride in the Song of Songs (7:10). “Desire” is the same word used in Genesis 3:16 and 4:7, both of which describe a desire for authority, domination, rule, a threatening desire.  The bridegroom of the Song reverses the…
We’re all deists.  The design of the universe shows that a Great Intelligent Something is responsible for it. No, says Athanasius.  The design of the universe is the impress of eternal wisdom on the creation.  The cunning of creation doesn’t manifest “God,” but eternal creative Wisdom, the eternal Word, whose…
Thomas writes that “to signify something by words or merely by the construction of images . . . yields nothing but the literal sense” and “poetic images refer to something other than themselves only so as to signify them; and so a signification of that sort goes no way beyond…
Denys Turner notes that the Song of Songs presented challenges to the “minority” of medieval theologians who argued for a more rigorous grounding of spiritual in literal senses.  For these, the text speaks literally, referring to specific events; and these events, as Thomas says, providentially typify future events. To qualify…
The distinction of image and likeness has been a common one in the history of theology, East and West, and in the West at least it overlaps with the nature/grace dualism.  Image for Bonventure “denotes a kind of ‘shape,’ that is, a quantitative feature of quality or a qualitative feature…
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