Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Bruce Marshall once wrote that every young man who rings the bell at a brothel is unconsciously looking for God. While it is not necessarily true that the inward desire of every man is ultimately a thirst for righteousness, it is true that every sin is the disordering of a…
In a previous essay , I argued that the story which begins with Lot and culminates in Ruth’s great-grandson David follows God’s five-fold pattern of creative work as laid out by Jim Jordan: taking something in hand (in this case, the Abrahamic family), restructuring it, distributing the product of labor,…
Gilder, George. Men and Marriage. Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2023. 1 By 1973, the hightide of second-wave feminism had flooded the beaches of American culture. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique eroded the shores of traditional female roles by naming and stirring up further domestic discontentment. Kate Millet wrote her dissertation-turned-book,…
The Book of Job is a very tortuous book. The arguments of Job and his friends are shot through with truth and error hopelessly mixed together. Every line of contentious poetry stands locked in deadly battle with every other line. As maddening as this can be for a reader who…
More than once in the last 50 years it has occurred to me that Paul might have known Jesus before He appeared to Paul on the Damascus road, but I had never taken up the notion in earnest until recently when I ran into a book by Stanley Porter titled…
The question in the title is genuine, not polemic. I could be perfectly happy to follow an ancient — and what is regarded as a well-attested — tradition. But I do not feel compelled to follow it simply because it is tradition. I would like to have arguments that Peter…
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In his recent book on the West’s war on “Jihadism,” Weigel observes that it is ironic that the “new atheism” has emerged just when religion has become unavoidably dominant in world politics. Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris would, Weigel suggests, deprive the West of necessary categories for engaging Islamic radicalism: “a…
In his recently reprinted Family and Civilization , Carle Zimmerman notes that the “domestic family” ideal developed in the 12th century. In this model, marriage is liberated from family power, from patriarchalism. He quotes from a text on Canon law: “The marriage jure canonico ought to be completely free from…
One of the most controversial claims of some postmodern thinkers is that language creates rather than simply reflects meaning. Whatever the truth of that as a global statement about language’s generation of meaning, it is fairly obvious that language generates meaning at a lower level. In his first encounter with…
Noami sojourned in the fields of Moab for 10 years (Ruth 1:4), which points to the conclusion of the book, where the author traces the descend of Judah for 10 generations, to David. After 10 years, Naomi returned to the land, which by then had become fruitful (1:22). After 10…
James Jordan points out in his lectures on Ruth that the book contrasts Boaz with Elimelech as husband. Elimelech is a failure as a husband, leaving the land and then leaving Naomi alone. The contrast of the two men also has a political dimension. Israel’s kings were in a quasi-marital…
A favorable Publishers Weekly review of Michael Burleigh’s Sacred Causes criticizes his obscure language: “Use of odd words such as ‘erastianism’ and ‘soteriological’ detract from what is otherwise a rewarding example of intellectual history.” It’s a book about religion and politics, mind you.
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