Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto Me. In 2005, God blessed our family with our third child, our second daughter, whom we named Bethany. As soon as Bethany was born, we knew there was something different about her. Unlike her two older siblings, who were born…
Christian, what is it that we believe? While Creeds like the Nicene and Apostle’s have been fundamental pieces of Christian liturgy and life, the American Church is highly unattached to these classic statements. From this creedal phobia has arisen the popular “No Creed, but Christ” slogan. Such slogan, of course,…
Revisiting William Cavanaugh’s devastating 2009 The Myth of Religious Violence . The myth of Cavanaugh’s title is a well-known one. According to the myth, religion is a distinct sphere of human life and practice from the rest of human social life, a universal impulse in human beings, and is dogmatic,…
19 Then the same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews, came Jesus and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you. 20 And when he had so…
An octave is a repetition, a repetition with a difference. It’s not the first note played again , but the first note played at a higher pitch. Octaves have always marked new beginnings. Hebrew boys were circumcised on the eighth day. Firstborn sheep were dedicated to Yahweh on the eighth…
We say Jesus’ resurrection is good news. It wasn’t good news for the disciples on the first Easter. More like perplexing, bewildering news. For others, it wasn’t perplexing, and it certainly wasn’t good. It was plain old bad news. Early in Luke’s gospel, Herod is terrified that Jesus might be…
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Allen Kerkeslager argues in a 1993 JBL article that the bowman riding on the white horse is a false Messiah (Revelation 6:2). He looks Messianic, what with his white horse. But the bow is the clue. Kerkeslager connects the bow to Psalm 11:2, 78:57 and other Old Testament texts where…
Our English translations give the impression that Jesus misquotes Isaiah. Isaiah 29:13 is translated “they remove their hearts far from me,” but Jesus is quoted as saying “Well did Isaiah prophesy . . . their heart ( kardia auton ) is far from me” (Mark 7:6). Jesus seems to change…
NT Wright often complains that traditional Christology works only with the two poles of the gospel story—incarnation and atonement—and ignores the middle. A number of recent writers have complained that atonement theology has been detached from ecclesiology. The two complaints are linked, and they have a common solution. If we…
By most accounts, J.D. Salinger was an unpleasant piece of work. The NYTBR reviewer of Thomas Beller’s new biography, subtitled The Escape Artist , observes that “Salinger’s disturbing icon-sullying behavior has appeared in memoirs by his daughter (describing a selfish urine-drinking monomaniac) and by Joyce Maynard (revealing an unsavory penchant…
Todd Decker’s Who Should Sing “Ol’ Man River “ isn’t the story of the song’s origins so much as its afterlife. It’s a performance history, but one designed to see how the performances shaped the song and reflect the changing landscape of race in American culture. Decker writes, “‘Ol’ Man…
David Crystal has plundered the Oxford Thesaurus to come up with a compilation of oddities and forgotten words in Words in Time and Place . Crystal chose words based on several criteria: They choice of fields had to reflect the thesaurus as a whole; he wanted to reflect the global…
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