Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
We have moved from death to new life, from Lenten darkness to Easter light. And while Easter Sunday may have come and gone, it's effects are continually with us. This season has brought with it several new relationships, events, and signs of growth for Theopolis. We have been networking with…
In The People's Work , a social history of Christian Worship, Frank Senn summarizes the developments of the medieval period with regard to the Eucharist. He begins by challenging the assumption that medieval society was held together by “the church.” He notes that the church was often divided and conflicted,…
The structure of the Bible resembles something which was grown rather than built, composed rather than assembled. Its employment of “structure-as-sign” at every level from micro- to macrocosmic leads to the conclusion that a hermeneutic worthy of Scripture requires not only training in history, art and music but also the…
For some in first-century Israel, Easter was anything but good news. It was a terrifying surprise. For the rulers and powers that put Jesus to death, the idea that He had been raised by some power beyond their control was chilling. Early in Luke’s gospel, we're told that Herod thought…
Simon Peter went up, and drew the net to land, full of large fish, a hundred and fifty-three; and although there were so many, the net was not torn. (John 21:11) This is one of those texts in the Bible that many people puzzle over. It is not a puzzle…
God is not mocked, Paul says. God is mocked, says Matthew. Who’s right? The two are in perfect harmony, but to see that, we need to run through the passage again. We’ll see that at every point, the mockery is being turned against the mockers. At every point, mockery is…
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That’s Barthes not Barth. As in Roland. Prickett suggests that Barthes’ proclamation of the death of the author, his manumission of interpretation from the obsession with the limited, final, “secret” meaning, and his hope for a liberated “anti-theological” and “revolutionary” reading that refuses “to fix meaning” in fact opens the…
Poststructuralism likes to think itself radical, but Stephen Prickett (Words and the Word) points out that it excludes the possibility of novelty. Barthes says that a text is “a tissue of quotations drawn from the unnumerable centres of culture.” And Kristeva’s notion of intertextuality, on Prickett’s reading, encloses a text…
A few highlights from James Wood’s chapter on language in How Fiction Works . Early on, he mentions the “old modernist hope” that prose can be “as well written as poetry.” This will require readers and novelists to develop what Nietzsche called a “third ear”: “We have to read musically,…
Lewis remarks on the high difficulty of adverse criticism, noting that the difficulty lies partly in the fact that the defects of bad literature are found in good literature: “The novel before you is bad - a transparent compensatory fantasy projected by a poor, plain woman, erotically starving. Yes, but…
Lewis describes the process by which words that once expressed and aroused emotions by appealing to the imagination have been emptied of image-content and become purely emotional. “Damn you” used to be a real curse, because people believed in damnation. Now that fewer do, it’s a more or less purely…
In Lewis’s defense, he is trying to explain some of the limits of language, which are worth noting (this in the last chapter of Studies in Words ). One limitation has to do with language’s inability “to inform us about complex physical shapes and movements. Hence descriptions of such things…
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