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Writing

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

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Masculinity

Ringing the Brothel Door

Bruce Marshall once wrote that every young man who rings the bell at a brothel is unconsciously looking for God. While it is not necessarily true that the inward desire of every man is ultimately a thirst for righteousness, it is true that every sin is the disordering of a…

by Garrett SoucyOctober 31, 2023
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Ruth

Work and Gratitude in Ruth

In a previous essay , I argued that the story which begins with Lot and culminates in Ruth’s great-grandson David follows God’s five-fold pattern of creative work as laid out by Jim Jordan: taking something in hand (in this case, the Abrahamic family), restructuring it, distributing the product of labor,…

by Josh JensenOctober 27, 2023
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Books

Men, Marriage, and the Feminine Imperative: A Review of "Men and Marriage"

Gilder, George. Men and Marriage. Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2023. 1 By 1973, the hightide of second-wave feminism had flooded the beaches of American culture. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique eroded the shores of traditional female roles by naming and stirring up further domestic discontentment. Kate Millet wrote her dissertation-turned-book,…

by Bill SmithOctober 17, 2023
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Galatians

Get Behind Me, Eliphaz!

The Book of Job is a very tortuous book. The arguments of Job and his friends are shot through with truth and error hopelessly mixed together. Every line of contentious poetry stands locked in deadly battle with every other line. As maddening as this can be for a reader who…

by Jonathan WhiteOctober 10, 2023
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Apostle Paul

Before His Conversion, Paul Knew Jesus

More than once in the last 50 years it has occurred to me that Paul might have known Jesus before He appeared to Paul on the Damascus road, but I had never taken up the notion in earnest until recently when I ran into a book by Stanley Porter titled…

by Ralph Allan SmithOctober 4, 2023
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Acts

Did Peter Found the Church in Rome?

The question in the title is genuine, not polemic. I could be perfectly happy to follow an ancient — and what is regarded as a well-attested — tradition. But I do not feel compelled to follow it simply because it is tradition. I would like to have arguments that Peter…

by Ralph Allan SmithSeptember 26, 2023

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Theology

Theology and the Political

Duke University Press has just come out with a collection of essays edited by Creston Davis, John Milbank and Slavoj Zizek on political theology. As one might expect from the list of contributors (Milbank, Pickstock, Ward, Conor Cunningham, Kenneth Surin, Terry Eagleton and others) it’s a dense collection. It was…

September 6, 2005

Fundamentalist Athens

There are still, surprisingly, some classical scholars who minimize the influence of religion on Athenian democracy. Hugh Bowden’s recent Classical Athens and the Delphic Oracle is a direct assault on this secular vision. As summarized by Joy Connolly in the TLS, “Dismissing studies of Athenian politics that ignore religion, Bowden…

September 5, 2005
Philosophy

Plataristotelians?

Lloyd P Gerson has just published a book entitled Aristotle and Other Platonists , an effort to show that the two great philosophical opponents of ancient Greece are not opposed at all. He points to the “Neoplatonic” writers of antiquity, who attempted to harmonize the two philosophers. The TLS reviewer,…

September 5, 2005
Literature

Bellow’s Bible

James Wood (TLS August 5) explores the Englishness of Saul Bellow, and particularly his indebtedness to the rhythms and sounds of the Authorized Version. Some of his suggestions are quite a stretch (“By the factory walls the grimy weeds grew” is quite distantly related to Psalm 137:1 - Wood says…

September 5, 2005
Literature

Bellow’s Bible

James Wood (TLS August 5) explores the Englishness of Saul Bellow, and particularly his indebtedness to the rhythms and sounds of the Authorized Version. Some of his suggestions are quite a stretch (“By the factory walls the grimy weeds grew” is quite distantly related to Psalm 137:1 - Wood says…

September 5, 2005

Covenant and Consent

How does God’s covenant with Israel bind generations that did not consent to the covenant? asked Isaac Abravanel in his 15th-century Commentary on the Pentateuch . This problem was raised in particular by a rabbinic claim that “A person can be benefited without being present, but cannot be obligated without…

September 5, 2005

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