Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I grew up in the 1950s. This was before the "Sixties" and the democratization, informalization, and general cheapening of the church and her worship. Ministers were Father Donovan, Pastor Eckhart, Reverend MacPherson, Mister (Episcopal) Parker, and Brother Smith. Liturgical speech was high language, sounding kind of like the King James…
Metaphor exerts a surprisingly powerful influence within our thinking. Although it is easily dismissed as little more than a figure of speech, when we attend more closely to the ways in which we use it, metaphor’s importance swiftly becomes more apparent. Although many of our metaphors have become quite invisible…
What is a tree, scientifically speaking? A mere googling gives the following answer: “a woody perennial plant, typically having a single stem or trunk growing to a considerable height and bearing lateral branches at some distance from the ground.” We can increase detail by describing its family, genus, species and…
The majority of Western evangelical Christians rarely, if ever, fast as a form of spiritual discipline. In our culture, fasting is more connected with dieting than worship, the other side of our deeply ambiguous fascination with food. Food is everywhere. We eat more than ever before, at greater speed, and…
A Grammar of Creation An understanding of the visual-musical language of the Bible must begin with Genesis 1. This is fortunate, because when explaining biblical types to academics, as opposed to children, one is repeatedly forced to start from scratch. From birth, a healthy child is attuned to rhythm and…
In an inverse Eden, a land laid waste, one works alone tending the trash. There are none like him in all the earth, inquisitive, playful and most drawn to those mysterious, dancing bipedal creatures who lost earth and left it to go wandering the vast wilderness of space. Humans have…
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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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