Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
When a certain Samaritan village refused Jesus’ attempt to visit, James and John asked Jesus if they should call down fire from heaven upon it. The allusion to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is evident, but, as the story shows, James’ and John’s thinking was entirely warped. Jesus rebuked…
In the first part of this essay, I considered paideia (formation)and mimesis (imitation) in the context of Aristotle’s virtue ethics and that of the New Testament. The overall concern is to realize how relevant is Aristotle’s ethics both to diagnosing our current malaise and to enculturing our children, though we…
In these posts I am inviting you into my philosophical reflection about integration , the absence of which we feel palpably in our fragmented world. My hope is for us to understand it more deeply, and to be ourselves reintegrated in the process. At this point in this extended inquiry…
It’s hard to imagine someone, centuries from now, mistaking our culture for a moral highpoint in the history of the West. Increasingly the news is dominated by school shootings, abusive policing, sexploitation of women, and increasing rates of suicide, addiction, and divorce. In response, the Left calls for regulations, surveillance,…
“The righteous cry out, and the Lord hears, and delivers them out of all their troubles. The Lord is near to those who have a broken heart, and saves such as have a contrite spirit.” (Ps. 34:17-18) God is listening. He is listening when we ask Him for financial provision,…
The allusions to Mt. Sinai in the transfiguration story point to Jesus as a new Moses and even more as Yahweh, the God who met Moses and Elijah on the mountain. The fact that Jesus, Moses, and Elijah spoke of Jesus’ “exodus” suggests that the mountain of transfiguration was intended…
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First Things has put up an article of mine on prophecy on their web site:http://www.firstthings.com.
Challenging a “solitarist” view of identity, Amartya Sen ( Identity and Violence ) writes, “The same person can be, without any contradiction, an American citizen, of Caribbean origin, with African ancestry, a Christian, a liberal, a woman, a vegetarian, a long-distance runner, a historian, a schoolteacher, a novelist, a feminist,…
Jordan also cites an article from Hector Avalos arguing that the repetition of the lists of musical instruments and Babylonian officials in Daniel 3 is intended satirically. Avalos writes: “[Henri] Bergson argued that simple mechanical iteration is a great source of comedy. When humans act as automatons or in an…
Jim Jordan points out that Daniel 3 lists seven ranks of Nebuchadnezzar’s officers, and also seven kinds of musical instruments. The numerical link perhaps points to a connection of musical and political performance, musical and political “orchestration.” Further, the word for “mighty man” (the Aramaic equivalent of gibbor ) is…
Bill Bryson’s recent Shakespeare bio begins with some delightful descriptions of extant portraits of the bard. The Droeshout engraving, Bryson writes, “is an arrestingly - we might almost say magnificently - mediocre piece of work. Nearly everything about it is flawed. One eye is bigger than the other. The mouth…
William Alston challenges Trinitarian critics of substance metaphysics, arguing that they have misrepresented classical notions of substance: “there is absolutely no justification for saddling substance metaphysics as such with these commitments to timelessness, immutability, pure actuality with no potentiality, and being unaffected by relations to other beings. To see this,…
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