Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
One common trope which is regularly invoked in current debates about the defensibility versus the danger of Christian engagement with critical theories (or, species of Critical Theory) is the idea of “ eating the meat but spitting out the bones .” Usually not far behind is a nod to the…
I am writing about the book of Proverbs in the Bible and “Eschatology.” I don’t refer only to the end of time, or “last things” that will happen in history before it ends as we know it. I am referring to all times of God’s judgment wherein He ends an…
“Unity” is the word of the day. In his inaugural address, Joe Biden invoked St. Augustine to inspire Americans to come together around certain shared values. As others have recently argued, Biden misreads Augustine in important ways. My argument here is that if we seek political unity and civic health…
This is part two of a series which began here ( The Half Shekel Temple Tax ) in which I answer back, hoping not to rebut but to glorify, some observations Peter Leithart made in a thought-provoking piece about the Temple Tax as atonement ( Atonement Money ). Adding economic…
It is now commonplace to characterize Wokeness (or “ Wokeism ”) as a religion , or at least religion-like . What I would like to explore is an elaboration on this emergent consensus, supplementing it with some theological analysis. Wokeness, I propose, is a form of post-Protestant neopaganism. It resembles…
Science Fiction movies often retell old stories and myths with greater impact for modern people. A being from another world or a technologically advanced human can embody an ancient god or demon and viewers are suddenly unwittingly enthralled by Ur tales that emerged from hundreds of years of human experience.…
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Honor was a chief value in the ancient world. For Jews, Greeks, and Romans, any violation of honor – by insult or attack – had to be avenged. Men – and this was a masculine ethic – had to defend their honor or endure a shameful reputation for weakness. Honor…
For ancient Romans, Shadi Bartsch argues in her The Mirror of the Self: Sexuality, Self-Knowledge, and the Gaze in the Early Roman Empire , sight was not merely passive and receptive but active. Gazing with the evil eye meant sending out “little bodies” out of the eye that “penetrate the…
This time from Tertullian, in his treatise on the veiling of virgins. Christian women, he says, ought to “go about in humble garb, and rather to affect meanness of appearance, walking about as Eve mourning and repentant, in order that by every garb of penitence she might the more fully…
Speaking of his sexual sin in the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, Reuben blames women for being too enticing: “For women are evil, my children, and by reason of their lacking authority or power over man, they scheme treacherously how they might entice him to themselves by means of their…
In the final “General Remark” in Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone , Kant deals with means of grace. Baptism, he claims is the “first reception of a member into a church” and therefore “is a solemnity rich in meaning which imposes grave obligations either upon the initiate, if…
Marek Jan Chodakiewicz of the Institute of World Politics analyzes the role of Holocaust revisionism in the Islamic assault on the West: “The terrible, if unstated, implications of the anti-Jewish logic of the Islamists are clear. For them, the Holocaust is the secular religion of the West. The United States…
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