Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Ten-thousand ‘yeses’ and a single ‘no.’ From bough it dangles, beauty to the eyes, For belly, food, a fruit to make one wise. Too soon, they eat; they know; the leaves they sew, But, oh! the Love who asks, “Where did you go?” Confessions flow from under leaf’s disguise; A…
In his masterful work, De Doctrina Christiana , Augustine of Hippo writes: I would have learned men to know that the authors of our Scriptures use all those forms of expression which grammarians call by the Greek name tropes, and use them more freely and in greater variety than people…
“In accordance with the creation pattern, God sovereignly took hold of Adam and put him to sleep. Then God divided Adam by removing flesh and bone from his side, and restructured humanity into male and female. When Adam awoke, God distributed the woman to him. Adam gazed upon her and…
Greta Gerwig’s new film, Barbie, has been criticized, probably rightly, for having too many ideas and layers to properly bring in any for a landing. Gerwig herself thought the script was so “ wild and anarchic ” that she was surprised WB agreed to make it. Many see it as…
“Now John wore a garment of camel’s hair and a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey” (Matt. 3:4). Why is John the Baptizer clothed with camel’s hair? Why does he want to look like a camel? Or at least: what does he expect…
In the second greatest story ever told, The Brothers Karamazov , Fyodor Dostoyevsky tells the story of a family plagued by the lasting legacy of sin’s destructive power and the all-surpassing truth that God is Light and in Him is no darkness. The young protagonist, Alyosha, is a monk committed…
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Ancient Near Eastern texts often refer to a god abandoning his house, the temple, sometimes in outrage over the evils of the people, sometimes because the people’s time has come to an end. Whenever the god leaves, the house and the city where it’s housed is left unprotected. Enemies come…
“Beyond the visual paradigm” was the challenge issued by the organizers of the symposium that eventually produced the volume Synaesthesia and the Ancient Senses , edited by Shane Butler and Alex Purves. In place of a visual paradigm, they wanted to offer a “synaesthetic reading of the ancient world” (2).…
Political histories of the Religious Right miss the underlying ferment that gave rise to the movement, argues Molly Worthen in her recent Apostles of Reason . The eruption was more fundamentally an eruption of tensions within Evangelicalism itself. Worthen argues that Evangelicals are united by three dominant questions: The reconciliation…
Isaiah uses the verb “be silent” ( chashah ) seven times. Nearly every time, it is Yahweh who is silent. He has restrained Himself until He cannot hold it in (42:14, 2x), keeping silent so long that Judah began to think they could get away with anything (57:11). For Zion’s…
Yahweh’s Servant will rejoice and won’t go silent until: A. Goes forth B. as brightness C. her [Zion’s] righteousness C’. and her salvation ( yeshu’a ) B’. as a torch A’. burns. Zion’s righteousness and rescue will be light flashing into her darkness, like the brightness ( nogah ) of…
John and Gloria Ben-Daniel argue in their The Apocalypse in the Light of the Temple that the temple serves as the “organizing principle” of John’s Apocalypse (4). The background of the book, then, is not Roman persecution of the church but “the destruction of the second Temple in AD 70…
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