Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Every advent of new media creates the justifiable reaction from some that the necessarily accompanied amputation may not be worth the extension made possible by the new tools. This is not unique to the Digital Age. Lamoignon Malesherbes, the French politician who was counsel for the defense of Louis XVI,…
A response to Gage Crowder's " The Hole in our Hope ?" Already, the first pages of the Bible promise a bright future. The story starts with the creation of heaven and earth, where heaven is perfect, but the earth is in a state of formless emptiness. Yet, God takes…
A rejoinder to Bubu Jarmulak's essay, " Embrace Pessimism ." Whereas calumnious critiques are reflections of more on the critic than the work criticized, good critiques are always opportunities for reassessment and improvement if they are received as such . Since its renaissance, the biblical doctrine of postmillennialism—or “optimistic eschatology,”…
Several decades ago, a pastor (and friend) mentioned in passing at one of our regular breakfasts together that he wasn’t satisfied with the usual reading of Jesus’s prayer in Gethsemane, the usual reading being that Jesus asked the Father to avoid the Cross at Gethsemane. We turned to the passage,…
On May 21, 1604, the cathedral of Toledo in Spain held job interviews for the post of choirmaster, the head of music at the church. The position had been vacated when the previous occupant, Alonso Lobo, was poached by the nearby cathedral of Seville, and Toledo needed a replacement who…
Imagine — counterfactually: on the night he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus held up an empty hand and said, ‘This is the blood of the covenant poured out for you. Drink of it.’ But there was no cup, no wine, nothing. If there’s no sign of the covenant, is there…
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Prior to the 18th century, writes Mark Evan Bonds, instrumental music was considered inferior to music that accompanied words ( Wordless Rhetoric ). According to the artistic theory developed by Johann Georg Sulzer, “instrumental music . . . can be pleasing and at times moving, but its ‘meaning' is relatively…
Paul's speech on the Areopagus is the second of three programmatic speeches in Acts. Robert Tannehill notes ( The Narrative Unity of Luke-Acts ) that they trace the progression of Paul's mission: “Careful planning is indicated by the fact that we have three different types of speeches addressed to three…
In his now-classic Sources of the Self (143-4), Charles Taylor observes that Descartes is “in many ways profoundly Augustinian: the emphasis on radical reflexivity, the importance of the cogito, the central role of a proof of God's existence which starts from ‘within,' from features of my own ideas, instead of…
Mark Evan Bonds's Absolute Music is a study of 19th-century debates concerning the purity or absoluteness of music, the question of the possibility and/or propriety of segregating music from the rest of the world, music as a sheer aesthetic experience, an experience of pure beauty or simple form. It's a…
Robert Tannehill points out in the second volume of his Narrative Unity of Luke-Acts that Acts 16-19 depicts a recurring “public accusation type-scene.” Prior to chapter 16, the public accusations against Paul and his associates are not highlighted. After chapter 16, they are. “In 16:20-21 Romans accuse the mission of…
Matthew B. Crawford argues in The World Beyond Your Head that things discipline our attention and thus make genuine knowledge of the world possible: “ things that can serve as a kind of authority for us, by way of structuring our attention. The design of things—for example, cars and children’s…
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