Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
"The faithful use of sacraments, and indeed a fully sacramental view of creation, is vital to the life of the Church. Baptism and the Lord's Supper are rites that directly shape the community and the Body, because they were given by God for that express purpose. A deficient practice of…
Weightlessness is fun. At the beginning of Gravity (2013) , we can see one astronaut dancing the Macarena and another one playing with his jetpack. They like it out there in the space. Apart from zero-gravity they can enjoy beautiful views, and even the silence is likable, although Matt Kowalski…
I recently went to a lunch that is more or less quarterly. About a dozen of us go. It is a lunch held in honor of a retired professor of religion and philosophy. I have been one of his acquaintances for more than 40 years. In his tenure as professor,…
Why Theopolis? Don't we already have seminaries and Bible colleges and other institutions for theological education? Why do we need another one? I get this question now and again. I ask myself this question even more often. What follows is a partial answer. Back in the 1990s, seminaries seemed to…
I think the logic of the Lutheran Reformation can be summarized in one sentence, attributed to Luther himself: "God does not need your good works, but your neighbor does." The first half of that statement is justification by faith . God doesn't need our works to satisfy his justice or…
If you are looking to start a fight with Christians, there is hardly a better subject to do so than the arts. Music, movies, paintings, and literature have provided no small battlegrounds for Christians to war. We are emotionally invested in the arts. A song, a book, or a film…
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Henri de Lubac notes that the traditional Christian view that man has a nature inherently receptive to a supernatural gift and fulfillment is based on revelation, and was unknown in ancient philosophy: “For the ancient Greeks - and one may say almost the same of all thinkers, ancient and modern,…
Against political/nationalist interpretations of the Hussite movement, Bynum argues that the central motif of the Hussites was direct access to blood. Two thoughts: First, this is still a central demand of the early Reformation, a point that Bynum touches on but doesn’t develop. Second, she notes that the stress is…
In her history of late medieval blood devotion ( Wonderful Blood , 2007), Caroline Walker Bynum teases out the connections between withdrawal of the cup from the laity and blood mysticism: “some of the cloistered, denied access to the cup at mass, received it in vision. Others (for example, Beatrice…
In his most recent novel (really a short novella), On Chesil Beach , Ian McEwan returns to some of the concerns of his recent work: Arnold’s Dover Beach , the way “the entire course of a life can be changed” in an instant, coitus interruptus . McEwan’s writing is always…
According to Dominican scholar Pierre Mandonnet, Thomas - that arch-scholastic - did not see theology as something “added to scripture but as something contained in it.” For Thomas, “to study and understand the Bible” was “an end, and theology a means.”
In a review of Drew Faust’s recent Republic of Suffering , Geoffrey Ward writes, “When the war began, the Union Army had no burial details, no graves registration units, no means to notify next of kin, no provision for decent burial, no systematic way to identify or count the dead,…
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