Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The resurrection stories in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are among the strangest stories in all of the literature of the world, even among the strangest stories in the Bible. That is true of each Gospel’s accounts individually, but even more of the collection as a whole. On the one…
As a pastor, I’m interested in discipleship. Christians are called to be disciples of our Lord Jesus Christ. Discipleship has everything to do with the disciplines we walk by in our lives. Things like Bible reading, prayer, and fasting are hallmarks of standard Christian discipleship. The basic thrust is that…
Psalm 1 is justly famous among biblical texts. It opens the Psalter, it’s a paean to the life-giving power of the Law, and it beautifully describes righteous life as a stable, fruitful tree. It subtly weaves the contrasting threads of wickedness and righteousness into a succinct summary of biblical wisdom:…
No book is more quoted in Hebrews than the Psalter: there are quotations and allusions to psalms on virtually every page. And many of the quotations are not passing references but closely considered and repeatedly cited as the author of Hebrews develops his central arguments. Much of Hebrews is exposition…
Howard Bloom is a beautiful hypocrite. The author of books in as different subjects as Mohammed, scientific theory, and the cultural upheaval of the 1960s, he professes to be a “stone cold atheist.” Yet in spite of that profession, Bloom obviously writes as a Jew; that is, he writes with…
There may be some debate about who deserves the title “the King of American literature,” but, at least to my mind, there should be no debate over who deserves to be “the Queen” – let’s give the crown to Flannery O’Connor. She is, however, a very unlikely queen. Unlikely, not…
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Peter Berger recently analyzed the state of the Anglican communion in The American Interest . The missionaries who were sent to Africa brought a gospel and Victorian morality. They succeeded in converting many in Africa to Christianity, and these converts conformed their lives to the morals the missionaries taught. Now…
Pericles is a drama of grief, loss, despair, ultimately a drama of joy, recovery and hope. At critical junctures in the play, music and story-telling play a redemptive role. Pericles uses music as a metaphor for love, licit and illicit, in the first scene of the play. When he discovers…
A friend pointed me to this remarkable statement from Augustine's de doctrina Christiana . Augustine is distinguishing between uti and frui , use and enjoyment, emphasizing that the only thing that can be enjoyed in itself, rather than for the sake of something else, is God. He elaborates with a…
Matthew Avery Sutton's American Apocalypse tells the story of American Evangelicalism by telling the story of premillennial apocalyptic eschatology. The approach throws some fresh light on recent history. For example, he links premillennialism to the crusading of the Moral Majority: “As humankind approached the last days, the faithful believed that…
Joshua Kurlantzick defines State Capitalism as “countries whose government has a controlling ownership stake in more than one-third of the 500 largest companies, by revenue, in that country, a situation that gives these governments far greater control over the corporate sector than a government in a more free-market oriented nation…
My daughter MargaretAnn wrote a paper for school on angels in the book of Psalms. She observed that angels do what men do. Angels are fierce warriors (Psalm 78:49), obey God (Psalm 103:20), praise God (Psalm 148:2). This is a summary of what human beings are called to do. The…
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