Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
“13th of July, 4:50 pm. I'm sorry. I know that means little at this point, but I am. I tried, I think you would all agree that I tried. To be true, to be strong, to be kind, to love, to be right. But I wasn't. And I know you…
CS Lewis's 1948 essay on “Priestesses in the Church” strikes a reader today as simultaneously quaintly naive and trenchantly prescient. The naive part comes near the beginning, where Lewis describes the decision to take “a revolutionary step.” It would “cut ourselves off from the Christian past and to widen the…
Imagine a version of the Lord of the Rings beginning with Sauron riding into the Shire and lopping off heads in a mad search for the ring, driving Frodo to flight from the beginning, helter-skelter and harried. While, no doubt, some Hollywood exec is at this moment scrambling to reboot…
A Communist Confession of Faith states that the aim of the Communists is “to organize society in such a way that every member of it can develop and use all his capabilities and powers in complete freedom and without thereby infringing the basic conditions of this society.” This aim can…
The story of the Fall enjoys a peculiar place in Christian thought. Together with the creation account in the two chapters that precede it, it is one of the few Old Testament narratives consistently to escape the relative neglect the Hebrew Scriptures often suffer. While the characters of Abraham, Moses,…
In the previous essay, we saw that fire is a work of the Holy Spirit. The two are related so closely that they cannot be separated. Now we turn our attention to the Spirit's relationship to water. Many have understood Spirit baptism to be a dry baptism, one that is…
Showing page 125 of 309
Showing page 1 of 43
Samuel tells Saul he will meet prophets coming down from a high place (from worship) playing instruments - harp, tambourine, flute, and lyre (1 Samuel 10:5). Each of these has a history; and the history of each is woven with Israel’s maturation as a people. Israel’s musical development tracks her…
9/11 pushed novelist Ian McEwan from unsettled agnosticism into atheism. Since that day, McEwan says, he has felt that “religion was distinctly unhelpful in making compassionate, reasonable judgments about people’s lives. On the whole, the secular mind seems far superior in making reasonable judgments.” That is an odd conclusion to…
An analysis from Stratfor Global Intelligence claims that the effort to re-establish medieval caliphates will run into several obstacles. The first has to do with internal divisions among radical Islamists themselves. Muslim nation-states are admittedly artificial, often weak, but still Islamists tend to group together along national lines: “Most Islamists,…
Three things stand out in Charles Lowry’s 1946 essay on The Trinity and Christian Devotion . The first is that the book exists at all, since it comes from a time when Trinitarian theology was supposed to be pretty much moribund. (Rahner’s book was published in 1970.) The second is…
Wanting to figure out what makes someone attractive on Tinder, Anne Helen Petersen created her own experimental knock-off and tested it on about 800 people. She reports her findings at buzzfeed.com . Petersen found that race was an important factor in attraction, as was religion. Even when religion was not…
When the Lamb opens the seven seal, there is silence in heaven for a half hour. There are several questions to ask about this silence. The first is, What is being silenced? Everything? It could be taken as total silence that lasts only from the time that the seventh seal…
Showing page 528 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
