Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
"Vanity of vanities", says the Preacher. "All is vanity". Life, we are told in the book of Ecclesiastes, is a repetitious, wearisome cycle; all that is and all that will be has already been. There is nothing new under the sun. What is crooked cannot be made straight, what is…
The Bible tells us that when God created the earth, He set up three zones of life. The first was the world itself. The second was the holy land of Eden. And the third was the Garden in Eden, God’s sanctuary. God told Adam and Eve that every tree was…
In our survey of Biblical chronology we have arrived at the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, which provide chronological information for the period after the return from exile, the Restoration Period of Old Testament history. The question we begin to address in this essay is whether the Artaxerxes of these…
These verses from the Sermon on the Mount are generally taken in connection with Jesus’ earlier statement concerning adultery in the heart (vv. 27-28); the eye and the hand have obvious relevance to the sin of adultery. At the same time, most commentators admit that the principle of avoiding occasions…
17. The eye that mocks a father, And despises to obey a mother, The ravens of the valley will pick it out, And the young eagles will eat it. 18. There are three things that are too wonderful for me, Four that I do not understand: 19. The way of…
The modern Church in America and virtually everywhere else is ideology-centered, not geographical. This is because various Churches believe different things and have different customs of worship and sacraments. The ideological Church has gradually developed from the time of the Reformation, because accuracy of doctrine has become more important to…
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Desmond offers an intriguing argument for a unified self, for an “idiotic” self in the original sense of idiotes , what is one’s own. There is an irreducible “mineness” to all our actions and experience, a mineness that cannot be reduced to categories or analyzed in terms of outside forces:…
Desmond takes another enthralling step. If “seeing is” may be “seeing is,” then metaphor might reveal being. “Metaphor may be a revelation of reality. Metapherein - the thing carries itself across to revelation, metaphorizes itself; this is its spread beyond univocal identity. In its self-metaphorizing, it reaches out to more,…
It might seem that saying things have determinate qualities undermines their dynamism, while emphasizing things dynamism of things fuzzies all the boundaries to the point where there are no things at all. Desmond, again, demurs. We cannot have a pure flux without any determinacy, because then “there would be no…
Modern thought is often materialist. Whatever happens to spirit in such an outlook, at least we’ve got things left. Right? Not so, argues William Desmond ( Being and the Between ) . The doctrine of primary and secondary qualities, he says, is a “classic bifurcation of thinghood into two extremes…
As I noted a few weeks ago, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen points out that everyone has multiple identities, and that these identities slip into the foreground and background in different settings. At a family reunion, our family identity is prominent. At a political rally, family identity recedes as we join…
In separating philosophy and theology, Spinoza mounts a kind of historicist critique of the Bible; its authors are bound by the assumptions of their time and culture. Besides that, the Bible and philosophy are completely different in method and style; the Bible is narrative, and its truth depends on the…
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