Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Every advent of new media creates the justifiable reaction from some that the necessarily accompanied amputation may not be worth the extension made possible by the new tools. This is not unique to the Digital Age. Lamoignon Malesherbes, the French politician who was counsel for the defense of Louis XVI,…
A response to Gage Crowder's " The Hole in our Hope ?" Already, the first pages of the Bible promise a bright future. The story starts with the creation of heaven and earth, where heaven is perfect, but the earth is in a state of formless emptiness. Yet, God takes…
A rejoinder to Bubu Jarmulak's essay, " Embrace Pessimism ." Whereas calumnious critiques are reflections of more on the critic than the work criticized, good critiques are always opportunities for reassessment and improvement if they are received as such . Since its renaissance, the biblical doctrine of postmillennialism—or “optimistic eschatology,”…
Several decades ago, a pastor (and friend) mentioned in passing at one of our regular breakfasts together that he wasn’t satisfied with the usual reading of Jesus’s prayer in Gethsemane, the usual reading being that Jesus asked the Father to avoid the Cross at Gethsemane. We turned to the passage,…
On May 21, 1604, the cathedral of Toledo in Spain held job interviews for the post of choirmaster, the head of music at the church. The position had been vacated when the previous occupant, Alonso Lobo, was poached by the nearby cathedral of Seville, and Toledo needed a replacement who…
Imagine — counterfactually: on the night he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus held up an empty hand and said, ‘This is the blood of the covenant poured out for you. Drink of it.’ But there was no cup, no wine, nothing. If there’s no sign of the covenant, is there…
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In his classic work on the Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations , Cyrus Gordon points to a very specific parallel: “Homeric tradition often represents military organisation as contingents of troops under a triad of officers for each contingent.” He cites Iliad 1.563-7 and Odyssey 14.470-1 for support. And…
Giorgio de Santillana’s Hamlet’s Mill is an exercise in un-forgetting. Ancients believed the world moved through various ages: “Each age brings a World Era, a Twilight of the Gods. Great structures collapse; pillars topple which supported the great fabric; floods and cataclysms herald the shaping of a new world.” And…
In an essay written around 1942, John Maynard Keynes beautifully captured the archaic character of Isaac Newton: “Newton was not the first of the Age of Reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the…
Giorgio de Santillana argued that mythology was not historical but cosmological ( Hamlet’s Mill , 50): “whatever is true myth has no historical basis, however tempting the reduction, however massive and well armed the impact of a good deal of modern criticism on that belief. The attempt to reduce myth…
Sim Van der Ryn’s Design for an Empathic World is a brief for person-centered design, design that takes the users and the world around a building into account. Van der Ryn sees “forward-thinking companies” doing just what he suggests. He quotes Paul Goldberger on Google’s California campus: “What is really…
University of Cape Town professor David Benatar argues answers the question “How many children should we have” with a simple “None.” “Morally responsible parents wish to spare their children pain,” he argues. But “the only way to prevent harm altogether is to desist from bringing children into existence. Any child…
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