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Writing

Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.

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Abortion

Lady Macbeth Christians

I was still a high school student the first time I read Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, but I will never forget the powerful impact the book had on me. Of course, as a second year student, I did not fully digest the book. In spite of subsequent readings, I…

by Ralph Allan SmithJanuary 26, 2021
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Book Review

Embracing Orthodoxy and Complexity: A Review of Orthodox Anglican Identity by Charles Erlandson

Crises force questions of identity. Identities may remain assumed until some event, or series of events, challenge what may have been taken for granted. The search for identity is an anxious one precisely because it tends to happen in times of upheaval and uncertainty. In his recent book, Orthoxox Anglican…

by Blake JohnsonJanuary 19, 2021
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Biblical Studies

The Half Shekel Temple Tax

Peter Leithart recently wrote a fascinating short piece about the Half Shekel Temple Tax as an atonement. Leithart argues three main points. First that the Sanctuary Shekel was heavier, i.e., more valuable than the everyday shekel. Second, he offers some analysis about the order of magnitude of the purchasing power…

by Jerry BowyerJanuary 12, 2021
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Symbolism

Sandwich for a Fool

There is no denial from the careful reader that 1 Samuel 24 and 26 are telling the same story. Perhaps we should say, virtually the same story. But that the stories are cut from the same cloth is undeniable. What we have over these three chapters—1 Samuel 24-26—is a very…

by Eric RobinsonJanuary 5, 2021
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Marriage

Building Altars & Fire from Heaven: A Wedding Homily

In his novel That Hideous Strength , C.S. Lewis is able to masterfully illustrate in narrative form so many of his insights about the subversive dangers of Leftist political dogma to Christian civilization. Perceptive essays from Lewis like “The Abolition of Man” and “The Inner Ring” are fleshed out in…

by Jeff MeyersDecember 31, 2020
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Ecclesiology

10 Theses of Ecclesiastical Conservatism

At a very practical level, the Evangelical Church has been injected with counterfeit spiritualities. We are a people looking for a city, whose builder may only be in office for four years. Our temptation to veer to the side of the temporal is striking in our day, especially as the…

by Uri BritoDecember 29, 2020

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Exhortation

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…

September 9, 2007

Phallic gaze

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…

September 9, 2007

More Blame-shifting

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…

September 9, 2007

Blame Shifting

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…

September 9, 2007

Means of grace

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…

September 9, 2007
History

The Shoah and Western Civilization

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…

September 8, 2007

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