Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Optimism is “an inclination to put the most favorable construction upon actions and events or to anticipate the best possible outcome.” 1 On the other hand, pessimism is “an inclination to emphasize adverse aspects, conditions, and possibilities or to expect the worst possible outcome.” We can see that optimism and…
If we wish to understand the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, we must begin with seeing them as a part of the creational order. Trees, along with plants and seed-bearing things, come to life by the word of God as part of…
“I chant slips and irreversible disasters, wiltings, failures, scars, the little disappointments and the large, blue streaks down a world that wishes it was only suncolors.” Paul J. Pastor from Kintsugi Song I recently lost something very valuable. Something I’d had for years and used every day. But, it wasn’t…
In his eponymous book, Jonah follows an exodus pattern. He travels through the waves and east of the city into the wilderness. On a first reading, it looks like another use of this common literary shape in the Old Testament: salvation through the waters of death and the wilderness of…
“Everyone serves the good wine first, and when people have drunk freely, then the poor wine. But you have kept the good wine until now.” The unknowing master of ceremonies didn’t know how right he was. We see this play out in John’s apocalypse. The end is like the beginning,…
Read in isolation, The Test of Adultery (Num 5:11-31) presents the reader with a seemingly bizarre ritual, conjuring up ideas bordering on the Salem Witch Trials. Beyond this, pressing questions linger—such as, “Why is the woman in particular singled out, while no test is provided for the husband of a…
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A TLS reviewer of Will Self’s recent Liver compares Self’s work with that of the late David Foster Wallace: “He shared with Self a willingness to experiment with genre, pastische and several other acutely artificial literary devices, as well as a sense of the grotesque, a liking for long words…
With his rock star style and his intoxicating brew of high and pop culture, Zizek seems to be a paradigmatic pomo. Not so, says Terry Eagleton: “If he steals some of the postmodernists’ clothes, he has little but contempt for their multiculturalism, anti-universalism, theoretical dandyism and modist obsession with culture.…
In a largely negative review of John and Carol Garrard’s Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent ( TNR , December 31), Leon Aron notes the importance of Orthodoxy in contemporary Russian politics: “Orthodoxy is now all the rage among the Russian elite. The formerly godless KGB and Komsomol graduates who rule the country…
Since the patristic period, the parable of the laborers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16) has been detached from its context and understood as a parable about Jews and Gentiles (Irenaeus) or about early and late conversion (Origen). Those are, I think, valid uses or applications of the parable, but the…
Several times in her Sacred Power, Sacred Space (Oxford), Jeanne Halgren Kilde makes odd comments about the gnostic emphasis on Jesus’ humanity. Like this: “Although Gnostics had struggled mightily to emphasize Jesus’ humanity, the concept of the holy Trinity, and with it the divinity of Christ, became orthodox. Yet the…
Now here’s a wonder. In his recent The Contested Public Square (IVP), Greg Forster says that in the early centuries the church developed “a thoroughly - and irreversibly - apolitical understanding of its own existence and mission.” Irreversible, that is, until it was reversed. Less that forty pages later, Forster…
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