Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I grew up in the 1950s. This was before the "Sixties" and the democratization, informalization, and general cheapening of the church and her worship. Ministers were Father Donovan, Pastor Eckhart, Reverend MacPherson, Mister (Episcopal) Parker, and Brother Smith. Liturgical speech was high language, sounding kind of like the King James…
Metaphor exerts a surprisingly powerful influence within our thinking. Although it is easily dismissed as little more than a figure of speech, when we attend more closely to the ways in which we use it, metaphor’s importance swiftly becomes more apparent. Although many of our metaphors have become quite invisible…
What is a tree, scientifically speaking? A mere googling gives the following answer: “a woody perennial plant, typically having a single stem or trunk growing to a considerable height and bearing lateral branches at some distance from the ground.” We can increase detail by describing its family, genus, species and…
The majority of Western evangelical Christians rarely, if ever, fast as a form of spiritual discipline. In our culture, fasting is more connected with dieting than worship, the other side of our deeply ambiguous fascination with food. Food is everywhere. We eat more than ever before, at greater speed, and…
A Grammar of Creation An understanding of the visual-musical language of the Bible must begin with Genesis 1. This is fortunate, because when explaining biblical types to academics, as opposed to children, one is repeatedly forced to start from scratch. From birth, a healthy child is attuned to rhythm and…
In an inverse Eden, a land laid waste, one works alone tending the trash. There are none like him in all the earth, inquisitive, playful and most drawn to those mysterious, dancing bipedal creatures who lost earth and left it to go wandering the vast wilderness of space. Humans have…
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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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