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Writing

Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.

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American Politics

In Whom Do We Trust?

"Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation. When his breath departs, he returns to the earth; on that very day his plans perish. Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord his…

by Gregory LaughlinMarch 31, 2015
macbeth
Literature

Macbeth and Nihilism

When it comes to the interpretation of Shakespeare, Harold Bloom is my favorite enemy. His writing is brilliant, his knowledge of things Shakespearean encyclopedic, and the insights he offers may puzzle, startle, or amaze, but they always educate. How then can he be an enemy? Because his anti-Christian bias is…

by Ralph Allan SmithMarch 31, 2015
london
Theopolis News

Theopolis in the UK

Theopolis President Peter Leithart spent the last week of March lecturing on worship and sacraments in England. He delivered four lectures on liturgy in Bolton, a town north of Manchester, arguing that Christian worship must be worship fit for the king and fit for the kingdom that has come in…

by TheopolisMarch 31, 2015
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Creation

Heavenizing Earth: Eschatology in the Beginning

When we think about eschatology, we think immediately of Daniel, of Matthew 24-25, of 1 Corinthians 15 and 2 Thessalonians 2, and of course of Revelation. We don’t, I suspect, think about Genesis. Perhaps Genesis 3:15, with its promise of the woman’s seed, would come to mind. So might the…

by John BarachMarch 26, 2015
baptism
Baptism

Baptism as Exorcism

Alexander Schmemann in his book, Of Water and the Spirit, expounds the question that appears in nearly all the older baptismal liturgies, “Do you renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world and all sinful lusts of the flesh.” This renunciation, according to…

by Steve WilkinsMarch 24, 2015
day-2-ferguson-protests-nationwide
American Culture

Franklin Graham and the Problem of Reaction

Franklin Graham recently posted the following statement on his Facebook page: “Listen up—Blacks, Whites, Latinos, and everybody else. Most police shootings can be avoided. It comes down to respect for authority and obedience. If a police officer tells you to stop, you stop. If a police officer tells you to…

by A. K. ShaukuMarch 20, 2015

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Essential/Accidental Meaning

Gracia’s own suggestion is that we can make sense of the determinateness and indeterminateness of meaning by distinguishing between “essential” and “accidental” meanings: “although texts may have a well-delimited core of meaning (an essential meaning), they may have other meanings that are the result of contingent conditions, such as changes…

June 6, 2008

No Smoking

In the entry on meaning in the Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible (Baker), Jorge Gracia responds to the view that textual meaning has no limits with this: It is true that “texts are understood by different persons, or even by the same person at different times, to mean…

June 6, 2008

Tallis

Joel Garver writes, in response to several posts from Raymond Tallis’s Not Saussure : “Most post-structuralist authors I’ve read aren’t dealing with things such as cups or trees or rocks, but rather things such as rationality, madness, criminality, virtue, etc. Foucault, for instance, seems to take bodies as ontologically basic,…

June 5, 2008
Literature

Bible and poetry

Fisch yet again: After reviewing the influence of the Old Testament, especially the Psalms, on prose writing in the seventeenth century, he adds: “it is worth bearing in mind that this is not only a matter of the seventeenth century. It is found earlier in the antiphonal plain-song of the…

June 5, 2008
Literature

Hebraic prose

Fisch again: Hebraic prose is different from the grand style of the sixteenth century, and different too from the pared-down plain style shared by many Puritans and all Baconians. It is a rhetoric, not an anti-rhetoric, but it is a rhetoric purified by Puritanism, Senecanism, and scientism. It is biblical…

June 5, 2008
Literature

Jerusalem and Albion

In his 1964 book, Jerusalem and Albion: The Hebraic Factor in Seventeenth-Century Literature , Harold Fisch argues that Blake provides a more insightful and broader account of the seventeenth century’s “dissociation of sensibility” than Eliot, who coined the phrase. For Blake, the great crisis of England was the dissociation of…

June 5, 2008

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