Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I live in an area where Mardi Gras is in full swing, and I can remember from my upbringing that Fat Tuesday was a last ditch effort at debauchery before the pseudo-spiritual practice of “giving something up for Lent” really began. In my youth I would give up some kind…
Part 1: Observations from the Texts (Matthew 9:14-17, Mark 2:18-22, Luke 5:33-39) The precipitating context for the new wine/old wineskins discussion is people asking Jesus why His disciples did not fast. His immediate answer is that you can’t get the friends of the groom to fast at the bachelor party…
Simply, “progress” means to move forward. In that sense, a slug can progress from one end of the sidewalk to the other. But for us in twenty-first century America, progress means something else. For us, it is almost a synonym for goodness. The slug can only “progress” if the other…
I have the privilege of being able to counsel a lot of women who are seeking abortions. I can tell you that the majority of them are seeking to end their pregnancies not because they feel like it would be a fun thing to do, but because they are scared…
Last night, along with a few online friends, I watched this debate on the meaning of life between William Lane Craig, Rebecca Goldstein, and Jordan Peterson, hosted by Wycliffe College. While watching it, and reflecting upon Peterson’s work more generally (about which I’ve written in the past ), I was…
I’m glad to have been invited to contribute regularly to the Theopolis Institute website. Thank you, readers, for welcoming and joining what I hope will be a venture of integration. Integration itself is what I want to explore. And for me personally, this is the shape of my current integrative…
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A reader, Dan Glover, responds to my comments about Milbank’s take on the faith-seeking-understanding motto. He’s more correcting my presentation of Milbank than Milbank himself: ” I think that . . . he is wrong to say that ‘this is fundamentally an eschatological rather than an epistemological point.’ I think…
Brink Lindsey of the CATO Institute writes in the March 12 TNR that the key to success is, surprise, hard work and parental involvement. A couple of quotations: A study led by Florida State psychologist Anders Ericsson found that a “common denominator” in their study of top performers in various…
In an article in Religion Compass , David Janzen challenges Milgrom’s understanding of sacrifice as “purgation” and his claims about the effects of sacrifice. Rather than purging, sacrifice emphasizes Yahweh’s difference from Israel, the requirement of Israel’s obedience, and the consequences of her failure to obey. He concludes: “But the…
In his NIV Application commentary on Mark, David Garland interprets Jesus’ statement about the temple as a “house of prayer for all nations” as a condemnation of the separation of Gentiles in the temple: “During his entire ministry Jesus has been gathering in the impure outcasts and the physically maimed,…
In the introduction to his contribution to the Oxford History of the United States ( What Hath God Wrought , 2007), Daniel Walker Howe quotes an 1850 Methodist women’s magazine’s ecstasies over the telegraph: “This noble invention is to be the means of extending civilization, republicanism, and Christianity over the…
Ratzinger charged that after Vatican II, some Catholics “deliberately raised ‘desacralization’ to the level of a program.” By this, he was referring to a liturgical theology that begins from the abolition of the temple and the rending of the vile and concludes that “the death of Jesus, outside the City…
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