Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I believe hymnals should be shorter than they are. Much shorter. 100 hymns at most, let’s say. I imagine that this will be a hard one to swallow for most of my readers, so I will attempt to bolster my argument as best I can. I can’t think of any…
Joshua is never called a king in the Bible. Yet while lacking the title, Joshua possesses the trappings of biblical kingship to a degree that it seems warranted to consider him a royal figure. There are lots of reasons for thinking this. In a 1981 Journal of Biblical Literature article,…
God speaks. He is not silent. He has designed humanity for reception of such communication and also to speak on His behalf. This speaking is not simply happenstance. It is not just a curious quirk about humanity. It is intrinsic to who we are that we speak and shape the…
One evening, years ago, home from college for Christmas break, I dreamt that I was playing the piano, passionately and well, in the church sanctuary beneath the parsonage in the renovated mansion in rural New Hampshire where my father was the minister. It was something of a lucid dream because…
I’m a big worrier. Always have been. Some of my earliest memories are of being anxious to the point of getting sick, sometimes for trivial reasons. My mind moves a million miles a minute, wondering what will happen in 5 minutes, or tomorrow, or next week, or in ten years.…
“The sun had gone up on the earth when Lot came to Zoar. And the LORD rained on Sodom and on Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the LORD from heaven, and he devastated those cities and the whole valley and all those dwelling in the cities and the growth of…
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A few fragments from another project. On October 16, 1869, Charles W. Eliot gave his inaugural address as he took over the post of President of Harvard. It was “one of the greatest addresses in modern educational history, delivered with precise diction and in a deep mellow voice that lent…
These are notes for a talk I gave to college-bound junior and senior high school students. I want to begin with something like a quiz. For the first part of the quiz, I’ve had help from my own teenaged kids, who have given me some help identifying the right kinds…
Heath and Potter find Thorstein Veblen’s critique of consumerism much more persuasive, “far more penetrating than any of the theories developed in the 20th century.” Veblen argued that while poor societies devote every increase in production to meeting basic needs, richer societies can devote increases in production to “honorific” goods:…
In their book, Nation of Rebels , Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter explain why the Marxian critique of the consumer society as a product of “generalized overproduction” doesn’t work: “There is no such thing as generalized overproduction. Never was, never has been.” More fully, “The problem with Marx’s theory is…
The folks at First Things have posted a Pentecost meditation of mine on their web site: http://www.firstthings.com.
An article by Orthodox theology George Florovsky summarizes some of the history of the discussion of the motive of the incarnation in Western theology: “Rupert of Deutz (d. 1135) seems to be the first among the medieval theologians who formally raised the question of the motive of the Incarnation, and…
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