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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After David sins with Bathsheba, the prophet Nathan comes to him with a “case” involving a rich man preying on his poor neighbor. It’s David’s own life, but he doesn’t recognize it, and his words of condemnation get turned against him: “You are the man” (2 Samuel 12). When Absalom…
Wyatt Mason’s wide-ranging NYT interview with Marilynne Robinson is full of interest for Robinson’s fans. In one of the most incisive portions of the interview, Robinson answers Mason’s question, “What do you think people should be talking about more?” Her consciousness streams in reply: “‘One of the things that bothers…
At Bloomberg , Glen Carey observes that “The Middle East may be sliding toward a warlord era, with nation-states increasingly struggling to control all their territory and millions living under the rule of emergent local chiefs and movements.” He quotes Chatham House fellow Nadim Shehadi’s claim that “It is almost…
Kathleen Rooney says that poets write animal poetry for two reasons: “one is because animals provide a metaphorical window into the human world from a surprising vantage. Another is because of their very inhumanness and potential sublimity. A successful animal poem makes use of both, weighing those two impulses against…
Questions about the “necessity” of atonement are usually framed in terms of the character of God and the nature of sinful humanity. Given these two factors, could God have followed any other path than the cross? Augustine and Aquinas said Yes, Anselm said No. But God and sinful humanity aren’t…
Some excerpts from Ivor Davidson’s fine introduction to God of Salvation . Davidson stresses the intrusive character of the gospel’s God. The story is “profoundly startling, disruptive of natural hypotheses about the conceivable relationship of divinity and finitude, shattering to instinctive assumptions that creaturely life must be immune from personal…
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