Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
“What’s the fastest route” he asks me as we quickly come to a stop behind a sea of red brake lights. I pull out my phone and map all the options. Every way is red with traffic backed up. Deep down I must be a small town girl because traffic…
Dear Friend of Theopolis, I have signed a stack of documents in the years since we started Theopolis, but my heart jumped a few beats as I looked at the thick lease contract. “This is real,” I thought. “This makes it really real.” Theopolis has been real for nearly three…
In the Edenic world of Perelandra, from C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, Ransom notices something about how the Green Lady treats the animals: [1] “There was in her face an authority, in her caresses a condescension, [2] which by taking seriously the inferiority of her adorers made them somehow less inferior…
In my previous two articles, I argued for the significance of the fact that baptism addresses our bodies in their objectivity. In the body, the self has an existence that runs deeper than our consciousness, decision, self-expression, and action. In washing our passive bodies, baptism seals us with an anticipatory…
Judah is a sinful nation, weighed down with iniquity. They are not the seed of Abraham, but the seed of iniquity. Their worship is abominable to Yahweh, because their hands are covered with innocent blood. They have not done good, or sought justice, or reproved the ruthless, or defended the…
Although we tend to define ourselves by our subjectivity —our perceptions, thoughts, feelings, decisions, actions—we are frequently forgetful of the objectivity of the self as body, the reality of the self that underlies and precedes all of our subjectivity. The body is the site of our ‘givenness’, where we are…
Showing page 139 of 309
Showing page 1 of 43
The following was delivered as a Convocation Address at the beginning of the 2017-18 Theopolis Institute's Junior Fellows Program on August 14, 2017 . Theopolis is the embodiment of a dream. Our name expresses the contents of that dream. We dream of a polis , a city. Every city is…
Hezekiah's Passover (2 Chronicles 30) has a prominent place in the Chronicler's account of his reign. As William Johnstone points out ( 1 & 2 Chronicles ), Hezekiah's reign moves out from the temple to the city to the nations. He reopens and purifies the house of Yahweh (2 Chronicles…
Welcome to Leithart the blog. For those who are coming to the blog for the first time, please allow me to introduce myself. I am Peter Leithart, President of the Theopolis Institute , a study center and leadership training program based in Birmingham, Alabama. After spending several decades in the…
Philip Watkins ( Gratitude and the Good Life ) identifies three “pillars of gratitude.” These are components of gratitude as an emotional “trait,” as opposed to gratitude expressed in response to specific good received or as an emotional state: “These are presumed to be three subordinate facets that contribute to…
No one before the twentieth century, writes Robert Solomon ( The Passions ), paid serious philosophical attention to the emotions. There's a good reason for that, writes Thomas Dixon ( From Passions to Emotions ): The category “emotion” didn't exist prior to the 19th century. Between 1800 and 1850, there…
God made us to be knowers. We long to know. Esther Meek argues ( Longing to Know ) that the frustration of this desire is one of the effects of skepticism and relativism: “To be human is to make sense of experience. There are voices today that would discourage the…
Showing page 153 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
