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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Thomas writes in his commentary on John that “things were written in the Old Testament because they would be fulfilled by Christ. If we say that Christ acted because the scriptures foretold it, it would follow that the New Testament existed for the sake of the Old Testament and for…
Matthew Levering wisely rejects von Balthasar’s notion that Ezra-Nehemiah is “like a brook in the process of drying up”: “Why should the rebuilding of the temple and the renewal of obedience to the Torah, despite the diminishment of the splendor of the temple and the continuing failure fully to observe…
In a review of George Steiner’s latest book in the May 2 TLS, David Martin speculates on the connection between biblical exegesis and the development of intellectual toughness. For Jews and Scots, he says, “there are the intellectual resources built up by strenuous exercises, in wresting sense from sometimes recalcitrant…
Music is often considered the most mystical, ephemeral, ethereal of all arts. For some, music is for this reason the most perfect, the most purely artistic, of all arts. Maybe. But think: When Bach wants to “comment” (Calvin Stapert’s term) on the chorale “Wachet auf” in Cantata 140, he gives…
The distribution of angelic appearances in Matthew is significant. Angels actually appear as characters in the story only in chapters 1-4 and 28. In total, there are seven uses of “angel” in passages that describe angels as characters (1:20, 24; 2:13, 19; 4:11; 28:2, 5; there is also Satan’s quotation…
When the fisherman in the dragnet parable (Matthew 13:47-50) pull the net to the beach, they “sat down” in order to gather the good fish and throw the bad away. Why sit? Comfort? I doubt it. Jesus is talking about the end of the age, when the Twelve, made fishers…
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