Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
“13th of July, 4:50 pm. I'm sorry. I know that means little at this point, but I am. I tried, I think you would all agree that I tried. To be true, to be strong, to be kind, to love, to be right. But I wasn't. And I know you…
CS Lewis's 1948 essay on “Priestesses in the Church” strikes a reader today as simultaneously quaintly naive and trenchantly prescient. The naive part comes near the beginning, where Lewis describes the decision to take “a revolutionary step.” It would “cut ourselves off from the Christian past and to widen the…
Imagine a version of the Lord of the Rings beginning with Sauron riding into the Shire and lopping off heads in a mad search for the ring, driving Frodo to flight from the beginning, helter-skelter and harried. While, no doubt, some Hollywood exec is at this moment scrambling to reboot…
A Communist Confession of Faith states that the aim of the Communists is “to organize society in such a way that every member of it can develop and use all his capabilities and powers in complete freedom and without thereby infringing the basic conditions of this society.” This aim can…
The story of the Fall enjoys a peculiar place in Christian thought. Together with the creation account in the two chapters that precede it, it is one of the few Old Testament narratives consistently to escape the relative neglect the Hebrew Scriptures often suffer. While the characters of Abraham, Moses,…
In the previous essay, we saw that fire is a work of the Holy Spirit. The two are related so closely that they cannot be separated. Now we turn our attention to the Spirit's relationship to water. Many have understood Spirit baptism to be a dry baptism, one that is…
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Derrida’s pursuit of the pure gift is premised on a strict dichotomy of “economy” and “gift.” “Economy” includes anything done for gain, no matter how meager that gain is (it might be the feeling of satisfaction I get from giving something useful to someone); “gift” is the impossible purity of…
Why grasp the horns of the altar when you’re a fugitive in the temple? How is it legitimate to touch the horns, when the altar as a whole is forbidden to all but the priests? The answer to the first is found in the premise of the second: The altar…
INTRODUCTION Micah prophesies of a “ruler in Israel” (5:2). But to grasp the full promise of this prophecy, we have to read it in the light of Micah’s description of Israel’s current rulers. To put it mildly, they are not pleasant fellows. The Christ is going to come to establish…
Feasting and care for the poor have been polarized in contemporary culture. If you’re a “conservative,” you’re in favor of free trade, consumption without guilt, festivity without concern for those who can’t join you, who probably deserve their poverty anyway. If you’re a “liberal,” you renounce festivity because other people…
Ruth not only points ahead to the union of Jews and Gentiles, but records it. Ruth the Moabitess marries Boaz the Jew - a marital union of Jew and Moabite, and Obed incorporates Jew and Gentile in his own body. Obed, whose name means “servant,” is a type of the…
Perhaps the pattern noted earlier can be applied more broadly. Perhaps the incorporation of outsiders is always what spurs God’s return to save the insiders. So, the current moment may not only be one (as Philip Yancy put it) of God moving on from the West to a place where…
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