Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
There’s something about joy that is infectious. And occasionally, we all have the opportunity to be in someone’s presence who is so happily engaged in their work, so joyous in their pursuits, that we want to learn from them. We want to know where that joy comes from and attain…
Jesus has told us that He intends all nations to be discipled. Nations. Not just individuals. All nations as theocracies. That being the case, the Church exists for the life of the world. Being baptized is not only a matter of becoming part of a new family, it is also…
Harold Bloom’s essay on Macbeth includes the kind of penetrating insights that make Bloom the great Shakespearean scholar that he is, but it also includes his typical and intense anti-Christian bias. “If Lear was pre-Christian, then Macbeth is weirdly post-Christian. There are, as we have seen, Christian intimations that haunt…
Revelation 16 is a day of atonement text. The tabernacle of the testimony has been opened (15:5). The angels who receive the bowls are clothed in linen (15:6), the clothing of the high priest when he goes into the sanctuary on the day of atonement (Leviticus 16:4). The temple is…
From time to time, when I’ve lectured on how to read the Bible, I’ve used art-music as one example thereof. When we listen to a simple folk song, we hear the same melody over and over again, but this is not how composers write "high" music. Let me amplify. A…
"For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea-monster, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth" (Matthew 12:40). Some reflections on Jonah’s Big Fish have led to the following essay. Let me…
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The exhortation for Sunday, September 14: Jesus knew that His teaching differed from the teaching of others in Israel and especially from the Pharisees, and His warnings at the end of the sermon show that He wanted to distinguish His teaching from others. He gives a quick succession of “cartoons”…
The life of Aldous Huxley is a parable of the modern age. Descended from Darwin’s bulldog Thomas Henry Huxley and Matthew Arnold, Huxley was part of an elite intellectual class of distinctly Victorian orientation. He was greatly offended by the “mass culture” that he saw developing around him, and wrote…
In Jesus’ “sermon on the plain” in Luke 6 there are a number of cool structures and numerological patterns. The whole sermon is divided into three large chunks, the Beatitudes (vv. 20-27), a section on love of enemies (vv. 27-38, which is marked out by the beginning phrase “But I…
Noemie Emery is one of the most interesting political writers today. She has a David Brooksish ability to display the inner connections between politics, personality, and culture, all with a sharp historical sensibility. She is not nearly so entertaining a writer as Brooks, but more profound. Consider this superb passage…
Neil Elliot, in the book mentioned in the previous post, says that “The conspirators who assassinated Caligula included an officer he had sexually humiliated, who stabbed the emperor repeatedly in the genitals.” I recall that Plutarch records something similar about Brutus’s strike against Julius Caesar. Does this suggest that striking…
In the midst of some typical and typically inane apology for sodomy, Neil Elliot (in Liberating Paul: The Justice of God and the Politics of the Apostle , Orbis, 1994) raises the interesting question of why Paul focuses on sexual immorality at the beginning of his letter to the Romans…
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