Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Who were the company of singers who sang in the Temple built by Solomon? I think many people might answer “the Levitical singers.” That is not correct, because the Levites were not allowed inside the Temple; only the priests were. The Levitical choir and orchestra performed for Yahweh outside the…
Dear Congregation, Social media is awash with rants for and against the ruling from the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) yesterday regarding homosexual marriage ( Obergefell v. Hodges ). My contribution on Facebook was simply to quote relevant sections of the dissents written by the four judges in the minority. Even though…
After the Civil War, the hobbled nation and fractured races looked about for leadership; animosity was high and envy was crouching at the door. Booker Taliaferro Washington, up from slavery, surveyed the rising tension and injustice, foreseeing civil unrest and chafing inequalities, eschewed, remarkably, a legislative remedy and advised a…
The ruling on Obergefell v. Hodges “came down” on Friday morning, June 26, 2015, like a bolt from Zeus. Many who refuse to bow to the dictates of our Olympians will write trenchant legal, theological, and cultural/political analyses of the court’s ruling. What I’m comfortable contributing to the historical record,…
Orthodox Christianity has lost all cultural potency in the U.S. No one defending traditional marriage before the court dared raise the fundamental question: Who creates marriage, God or the state? Theology has no public standing, no persuasive force in the culture at large. Obergefell is another nail in the coffin…
One will rarely come upon a classical allusion in a Robert Frost poem. His poetic scheme was to follow the speaking patterns of common folk, to use their words and images to achieve his point. Despite this simplicity, there is a depth and richness to his poetry that can be…
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Hippolytus tells the story that Apsethus of Libya trained parrots to fly over North Africa crying out “Apsethus is a god,” and Libyans were taken in and began to offer sacrifices to him. Then a “clever Greek” caught one of the parrots, and retrained it to cry out: “Apsethus, having…
In his encyclopedic Later Roman Empire , A. H. M. Jones explains that the church after Constantine failed to transform ordinary social behavior and culture not because it was too lax but because it was too rigorist. Ordinary Christians felt they couldn’t live up to the standards, and responded by…
Michael Hollerich, who has done some superb revisionist work on Eusebius of Caesarea, explains in a 1990 article from Church History that Eusebius employed a “similar situation” form of typology that focuses on similarities rather than differences between type and antitype, and draws out the similarities in great detail. He…
Milbank, discussing the possibility of educative coercion: “although Christianity . . . certainly requires in the end free consent to the truth, it does not fetishize this freedom merely as a correct mode of approach: truth is what most matters, and moreover a collective commitment to truth, since truth itself…
Milbank notes that “science and art have always first mimed the horrors to come.” Darwinian evolution and avant-garde prepared the way, for foreshadowed, twentieth-century horrors. He asks, “what may the far more shocking interventions of 1990s art and science . . . betoken for the present century?’
Milbank opens Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (Radical Orthodoxy) with a discussion of neo-Kantian arguments concerning radical evil. In the light of the Holocaust and twentieth-century totalitarianism, they argue, the traditional Augustinian privatio is deeply inadequate. In response, Milbank relativizes totalitarianism by arguing that “European and American liberal democracy has…
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