Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Genesis 3 ends on a decisive, and decisively negative, note. Yahweh “drove the man out” of the garden, and, in addition, “at the east of the garden of Eden He stationed the cherubim, and the flaming sword which turned every direction, to guard the way to the tree of life.”…
When she died in 2005 at the age of 72, Anna Haycraft, the author who published under the name Alice Thomas Ellis, was a celebrated writer in Great Britain. While working at Duckworth Publishers(which her husband owned), she produced a dozen novels, a collection of short stories, a cookbook, volumes…
Some have suggested recently that my "project" is postmodern. To clarify my views on postmodernism, I'm re-posting something I wrote in 2005, with a few modifications. For a fuller discussion, you can check out my Solomon among the Postmoderns (Canon, 2008). First, it is helpful to distinguish, as many writers…
Calling Jerusalem the "holy city" comes so naturally to Christians that it comes as something of a surprise to realize how infrequently the phrase is used in Scripture. Not only is Jerusalem rarely called holy, but in the Old Testament this classification is found only in texts that refer to…
Asking why the church doesn’t sing hymns or even why men don’t sing in church is a bit like lamenting over the lame man who can’t waltz on the dance floor. While it is a valid question, the more immediate question would seem to be, “why doesn’t the lame man…
The theme of 1 Timothy is the distinction between the true children in the Household of God and false children who really belong to the household of Satan. This is seen in the fact that in the chiastic structure of the Epistle, heresy is the subject in the center (…
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Martinus de Boer ( Galatians , 372) notes that the verb “walk by the Spirit” in Galatians 5:25 isn’t the normal peritateo but stoicheo , which means “stand or move in a row or line” as in a military formation. De Boer notes that “there may be an allusion, whether…
Several times in his The Godly Image , Romanus Cessario observes how Greek patristic writers influence Thomas’s understanding of the satisfaction of Christ. Cessario traces a shift from Thomas’s early Anselmian juridicism to a more personalist understanding of the atonement in his mature work. The difference, he suggests, had to…
The scientific revolution is often characterized as a revolution in method. In place of speculative, deductive metaphysical science came experimental, empirical science. Philip Ball ( Curiosity ) argues that behind this was a revolution in mentality, in the questions that could be asked and investigated: “To the new philosophers, the…
Katha Pollitt thinks that advocates of abortion rights have been cowed into meekness. In Pro , she argues that abortion needs to be reclaimed as a “positive social good,” and “an essential option for women — not just ones in dramatic, terrible, body-and-soul-destroying situations, but all women — and thus…
Julia Kristeva’s vigorous, rambling Teresa, My Love is a very personal reaction to the life and writings of Teresa of Avila. Kristeva, a noted feminist cultural theorist, doesn’t share St. Teresa’s faith. Still, she gets to the heart of Teresa’s mysticism in this quotation: “After the dialogical Socrates, before the…
The desire of the flesh is set against the desire of the Spirit, Paul says, so that the two are in opposition (Galatians 5:17). Where they clash, the combat stymies human choice: “you may not do the things that you wish” (cf. Romans 7). By returning to the “flesh” of…
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