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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“The Word was God,” says John. Where’d he get that? Genesis 15:1 is the first place where Scripture uses the phrase “word of Yahweh” ( dabar-YHWH ), and already here the use of the phrase hints that the dabar is a person. The word of Yahweh “came” to Abram (15:1,…
Peter Olivi set out a scheme of prophecy chronology from Adam to Abraham to the destruction of Jerusalem. The accuracy of this is not the point, but rather the claim that the end of the temple was a decisive redemptive-historical event. “Ab Adam usque ad primam primissionem factam Abrahe, Genesis…
A number of readers have suggested that I was wrongly critical of Athanasius’s claim that without God’s sustenance creation tends toward nothing; I said that this implied that creation has some tendency “independent” of God. The readers point out that Athanasius’s claim is exactly that creation has no independence and…
Diderot’s D’Alembert’s Dream develops a mythological monistic materialist ontology in which multiplicity develops from an original “polyp” but where nothing ever becomes really distinct from the whole or from anything else. There is no freedom, no real otherness, no real possibility of love. D’Alembert describes this ontology while masturbating in…
Athanasius repeatedly says that created things, having come from nothing, have an inherent tedency to move toward nothing again. They have to be sustained by God to remain in existence. No problem with the conclusion that God keeps things in existence. But the notion that things tend toward nothing seems…
Peter Olivi is one of a number of medieval exegetes who placed enormous significance on the fall of Jerusalem. In part, this was driven by anti-Jewish polemics; they argued that prophecies foretold that the Messiah would come and the temple sacrifice would be ended - since the temple sacrifice has…
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