Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Along His journey to Jerusalem, Jesus stops frequently to have meals, three times with Pharisees (7:37-50; 11:37-54; 14:1-35). Meals were central to Jesus’ ministry. He comes “eating and drinking” (Luke 7:34). While His meals are not just for refreshment, they are opportunities for teaching the protocols of the kingdom. Meals…
Time as a realm of participation can be difficult for us imaginatively to grasp. While music is a profoundly temporal art, exploring the medium of time like no other, most of our temporal experience seems decidedly unmusical in character, disjointed and unorchestrated. The form in which we naturally discover time…
John devotes much attention to Jesus’ burial clothes. He tells us that Nicodemus brought about a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes to spice Jesus body, and that He was bound in linen wrappings. We find out that His body and His head were wrapped separately. (John 19:39-40; 20:6-7). When…
Thinking about time in terms of music also helps us to appreciate its unity and inner relations. Henri Bergson observes our cultural habit of dividing time into discrete moments, and conceiving of these as if akin to objects in a spatial succession. [1] Against such a notion, Bergson argues for…
As we attend to these and other aspects of music’s temporality, Begbie suggests, we will find means by which to resist some of our habitual modern ways of conceptualizing time, most especially our tendency to conceive of time as if it were a homogeneous set of technologically quantifiable units laid…
The Hidden Dimension In many fields of scientific study, the apparent complications and contradictions are dispelled once the internal logic is perceived. Biblical hermeneutics is no different, since the author of Creation is the Author of the Word. The Bible’s literary labyrinth radiates organically from an algorithm so simple it…
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Matthew 6:17-18: But you, when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, that you may not be seen fasting by men, but by your heavenly Father, who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will repay you. Fasting was a duty of Jewish piety, and…
Matthew 3:17: At Jesus’ baptism, a voice from heaven said, This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well-pleased. Baptism is an adoption rite. By baptism, Jacob enters the family of God. He is going to gain dozens of older brothers and sisters, lots of parents, a heavenly Father,…
Some sins are obvious. Murder is both a sinful act and arises from a sinful motive. After a murder, there’s a dead body and a murderer with a smoking gun. Murder is obviously and thoroughly evil. And the same is true of adultery, theft, false witness, and a host of…
At the beginning of Book 11 of Apuleius’s Golden Ass , Lucius returns to his human shape by prayer. As David Garland points out, the prayer is a good illustration of the kind of pagan prayers Jesus condemns in the sermon on the mount. In William Adlington’s 1556 translation, it…
Alex the African Grey died on September 6 at the age of 31. According to the obit in the Economist , Irene Pepperberg, a theoretical chemist who worked with Alex, had worked with Alex to the point that he “had the intelligence of a five-year-old child and had not yet…
In his splendid performance history of Shakespeare, David Bevington frequently comments on the “scenic literalism” of film and television. Commenting on a TV production of As You Like It , he laments that the production “tells us where we are in the story by putting entire landscapes or interiors in…
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