Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I am making a new rule in our house! We are actually kind of skimpy on the house rules. I try very hard to keep things simple: love God, love others, be joyful. It’s not complicated to avoid discipline here. But I have found myself repeating this new rule over…
Click HERE for Part 2 The voice of Jesus transforms and changes Mary when she hears him speak her name. This is her last “turning.” So also the woman in the Song of Songs longs to hear the voice of her beloved. Let me see your face, let me hear…
Click HERE for Part 1. The details of this story call the attentive reader back to the drama of Solomon’s Song of Songs. And the Song of Song’s alludes to, ties us into the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden and the promise of a coming Messiah that…
“The course was a paradigm shift for me,” said Jonathan Sedlak, a Milwaukee electrical contractor who attended Theopolis’s course on Revelation. “I am left with a book that is far more practical than it has ever seemed before.” Jonathan Anderson of Louisville, Kentucky found the course “refreshing.” “I finished with…
“It is only by participation in a rational, practice-based community that one becomes rational.” – Alasdair MacIntyre It may be perfectly clear to a chef why adding unsifted powdered sugar to a hot frosting is a bad idea. But for an amateur cook, this may be the kind of rule…
On a fresco in a chapel in Padua, Italy, there is a famous painting depicting the dramatic post-resurrection scene in John 20 with Mary and Jesus outside of the garden tomb. Giotto di Bondone painted it in the early 14th century. Jesus is striding from the tomb with a victor’s…
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In Rune 40 of the Finnish epic, Kalevala , the hero, Wainamoinen, is sailing with his friends to Pohjola, where he intends to recover the Sampo, a talisman of good luck and extraordinary, mysterious power. No one today quite knows what the Sampo was, but many of the episodes of…
Chaucer, like Shakespeare after him, set some of his poems in ancient Greece. The “Knight's Tale” takes place in Athens, ruled by the same “Duke” Theseus who rules Athens in Midsummer Nights Dream . Troilus and Cresyde is a Trojan love tragedy. Neither of these works, however, shows much deep…
According to C. S. Lewis ( English Literature in the Sixteenth Century , 27-28), English humanists were most interested in style, but the style was mostly Latin: “Greek was given abundance of ‘mouth honor,’ but only the minor Greek authors (Plutarch, Heliodrous, Chilles Tatius, the Anthology) were really relished. Greek…
Emily, the lady-love of Chaucer's “Knight's Tale,” the first of the Canterbury Tales, appears in a garden, and the poet describes her as if where were part of the garden. She is Eve in Eden. But this is no Edenic world. The men who see her are locked out of…
Tragic stories are fall stories. Whether through moral wrong or through some inadvertent hamartia , the tragic hero falls from a high place. Others are engulfed in the tragedy to one extent or another, but not everyone. Those who watch can experience the catharsis of pity and fear by watching…
C S. Lewis describes the formation of medieval allegorism in his classic Allegory of Love . He begins by distinguishing between an allegorical and a sacramental or symbolic turn of mind. Allegory begins, he says, with “an immaterial fact, such as the passions which you actually experience” and finds ways…
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