Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
It is a well-known movie trope, the sports car drives up, a stiletto-heeled starlet steps out and the camera follows her leg up the prodigious slit of her dress, then it takes in the rest of her figure before settling on her face, usually primed and puckered for some pro-feminist…
The “personalist” understanding of the Trinity, articulated most influentially in the work of John Zizioulas, has fallen on hard times. Recent scholars have attacked Zizioulas’s idea that Cappadocian Trinitarianism represented an ontological revolution, hammering again and again the distinction between divine and human personhood. Michel Barnes’s conclusion is the most…
I sit here in my office and poke around on a keyboard that is not even physically connected to my laptop and characters appear on a screen. I have a phone in my pocket through which I talk to someone around the world, send a text message, and to which…
I want to give a pep talk. Nothing fancy, nothing clever. Jesus makes some astounding promises in Luke 11. I want to clear out the clutter and convince you to believe Him and to act on it. The chapter begins with Jesus praying and teaching His disciples to pray by…
Eleonore Stump in her book Wandering in Darkness invites us to re-read the story of Lazarus (John 11) from Mary’s perspective. Stump argues that the story of Lazarus is a story of Mary, since both Lazarus and Martha are identified by their relationship with Mary. The true ending of the…
In his introduction to The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift in Honor of James B. Jordan , Peter Leithart says this about him: “Jordan is an unclassifiable thinker because he is an unclassifiable person . . . he closes his eyes in ecstasy listening to Messiaen or Rachmaninoff . .…
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Pamuk again: “to read well is not to pass one’s eyes and one’s mind slowly and carefully over a text: it is to immerse oneself utterly in its soul. This is why we fall in love with only a few books in a lifetime. Even the most finely honed personal…
Pamuk again, summarizing a comment from Proust concerning reading: “There is, he said, a part of us that stays outside the text to contemplate the table at which we sit, the lamp that illuminates the plate, the garden around us, or the view beyond. When we notice such things, we…
In an essay on Notes from Underground , the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk suggests that Dostoevsky’s “anger was not a simply expression of anti-Westernism or hostility to European thinking: What Dostoyevsky[his spelling] resented was that European thought came to his country at second hand. What angered him was not its…
Jesus comes to bring a sword that sets sons against fathers, daughters against mothers, etc. (Matthew 10:34-39). What is the sword? Perhaps Rome; and when Jesus wields the sword of the Roman armies against Judea and Jerusalem, He sets family members against one another. With Rome threatening, some Jews will…
What is the “Parable of the fig tree” that Jesus mentions in Matthew 24:32? The fig tree’s branches and leaves will tell you that summer is near, and that when the things he describes take place the time of the end is near. But what does this refer to exactly?…
In her contribution to Hagar, Sarah and their Children (WJK), Phyllis Trible develops an interesting feminist reading of the story of Hagar. Her targets (surprise!) patriarchy and hierarchy, but along the way she makes some insightful observations on the text. She notes, for instance, that Hagar’s departure from the household…
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