Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
“13th of July, 4:50 pm. I'm sorry. I know that means little at this point, but I am. I tried, I think you would all agree that I tried. To be true, to be strong, to be kind, to love, to be right. But I wasn't. And I know you…
CS Lewis's 1948 essay on “Priestesses in the Church” strikes a reader today as simultaneously quaintly naive and trenchantly prescient. The naive part comes near the beginning, where Lewis describes the decision to take “a revolutionary step.” It would “cut ourselves off from the Christian past and to widen the…
Imagine a version of the Lord of the Rings beginning with Sauron riding into the Shire and lopping off heads in a mad search for the ring, driving Frodo to flight from the beginning, helter-skelter and harried. While, no doubt, some Hollywood exec is at this moment scrambling to reboot…
A Communist Confession of Faith states that the aim of the Communists is “to organize society in such a way that every member of it can develop and use all his capabilities and powers in complete freedom and without thereby infringing the basic conditions of this society.” This aim can…
The story of the Fall enjoys a peculiar place in Christian thought. Together with the creation account in the two chapters that precede it, it is one of the few Old Testament narratives consistently to escape the relative neglect the Hebrew Scriptures often suffer. While the characters of Abraham, Moses,…
In the previous essay, we saw that fire is a work of the Holy Spirit. The two are related so closely that they cannot be separated. Now we turn our attention to the Spirit's relationship to water. Many have understood Spirit baptism to be a dry baptism, one that is…
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1 Peter 3:7: You husbands likewise, live with your wives in an understanding way, as with a weaker vessel. As Toby has pointed out in the sermon, Paul describes the wife as a “vessel” that a husbands is to treat with honor. This is, as Toby pointed out, a priestly…
Lent is a season for taking stock and cleaning house, a time of self-examination, confession and repentance. But we need to remind ourselves constantly what true repentance looks like. “Giving up” something for Lent is fine, but you keep Lent best by making war on all the evil habits and…
Summarizing the lessons drawn from Steve Coll’s recent The Bin Ladens , Fred Halliday writes (in NYRB ), “although the attacks on Manhattan and Washington in September 2001 were direct hits on American soil, Osama bin Laden’s aims do not encompass the defeat of the United States, or the conquest…
Ian McEwan’s NYRB remembrance of Updike is the best obit I’ve read. He gets the dynamic of Updike right, locating the “seriousness and dark humor” in a “tension between intellectual reach and metaphysical dread.” He understands the centrality of Updike’s Lutheranism and of the cinema. He gets the sex right:…
I have had conversations with several people recently about the state of poetry, and I’ve seen other signs that there is a growing interest among Christians in reviving poetry. That’s great; the Bible’s written in poetry, and our un-poetic sensibilities have been one reason for our un-imaginative and inaccurate reading…
Sean Mahaffey writes: “The story of Paul seems to end ‘wrong.’ Here is a classically trained bold and faithful preacher with a leadership resume chained in the emperor’s house. Paul seems another Joseph/Daniel/Mordecai/Nehemiah. He should have been raised to a position of prominence - perhaps to the right hand of…
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