Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The resurrection stories in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are among the strangest stories in all of the literature of the world, even among the strangest stories in the Bible. That is true of each Gospel’s accounts individually, but even more of the collection as a whole. On the one…
As a pastor, I’m interested in discipleship. Christians are called to be disciples of our Lord Jesus Christ. Discipleship has everything to do with the disciplines we walk by in our lives. Things like Bible reading, prayer, and fasting are hallmarks of standard Christian discipleship. The basic thrust is that…
Psalm 1 is justly famous among biblical texts. It opens the Psalter, it’s a paean to the life-giving power of the Law, and it beautifully describes righteous life as a stable, fruitful tree. It subtly weaves the contrasting threads of wickedness and righteousness into a succinct summary of biblical wisdom:…
No book is more quoted in Hebrews than the Psalter: there are quotations and allusions to psalms on virtually every page. And many of the quotations are not passing references but closely considered and repeatedly cited as the author of Hebrews develops his central arguments. Much of Hebrews is exposition…
Howard Bloom is a beautiful hypocrite. The author of books in as different subjects as Mohammed, scientific theory, and the cultural upheaval of the 1960s, he professes to be a “stone cold atheist.” Yet in spite of that profession, Bloom obviously writes as a Jew; that is, he writes with…
There may be some debate about who deserves the title “the King of American literature,” but, at least to my mind, there should be no debate over who deserves to be “the Queen” – let’s give the crown to Flannery O’Connor. She is, however, a very unlikely queen. Unlikely, not…
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Hillaire Belloc concluded a 1927 debate with George Bernard Shaw with this: Our civilization Is built upon coal, Let us chant in rotation Our civilization That lump of damnation Without any soul Our civilization Is built upon coal. In a very few years It will float upon oil.
In his 1836 book, Contrasts , architect, designer, and social critic A. W. Pugin contrasts Bentham’s “panopticon” (Foucaultian symbol of modern surveillance and the carceral society) with an idealized Gothic “Ancient Poor House.” In his recent book on medievalism in modern England, Michael Alexander notes that Pugin was one of…
Dispassionate he’s not. In his recent book on evolution and the “big questions,” David Stamos tried to show how evolution can answer all the big questions of existence, far better than ID, for sure. Intelligent design is not “genuine science” but instead “essentially mythological thinking masquerading in a lab coat.…
I have some reservations about what Philip Bess means by “the sacred” and “response to the sacred,” but his applications to architecture are very intriguing ( Till We Have Build Jerusalem ; ISI, 2006). When people encounter “the sacred,” he says, they respond with sacrifice, prohibition, obedience. Architecture is one…
In his recent biography of Shakespeare, Bill Bryson quotes an anti-Stratfordian comment that contemporary documents never describe Shakespeare as an author. Bryson responds: “That is not even close to being so. In the Master of the Revels’ accounts for 1604-1605 - that is, the record of plays performed before the…
Jim Rogers of Texas A&M writes in response to my post on American priestcraft: [1] The dichotomy, “Enlightenment or evangelical” is a bit too pat for my taste, but then I tend to squint until I see shades of gray in what others see as the most black and white…
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