Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
It is a well-known movie trope, the sports car drives up, a stiletto-heeled starlet steps out and the camera follows her leg up the prodigious slit of her dress, then it takes in the rest of her figure before settling on her face, usually primed and puckered for some pro-feminist…
The “personalist” understanding of the Trinity, articulated most influentially in the work of John Zizioulas, has fallen on hard times. Recent scholars have attacked Zizioulas’s idea that Cappadocian Trinitarianism represented an ontological revolution, hammering again and again the distinction between divine and human personhood. Michel Barnes’s conclusion is the most…
I sit here in my office and poke around on a keyboard that is not even physically connected to my laptop and characters appear on a screen. I have a phone in my pocket through which I talk to someone around the world, send a text message, and to which…
I want to give a pep talk. Nothing fancy, nothing clever. Jesus makes some astounding promises in Luke 11. I want to clear out the clutter and convince you to believe Him and to act on it. The chapter begins with Jesus praying and teaching His disciples to pray by…
Eleonore Stump in her book Wandering in Darkness invites us to re-read the story of Lazarus (John 11) from Mary’s perspective. Stump argues that the story of Lazarus is a story of Mary, since both Lazarus and Martha are identified by their relationship with Mary. The true ending of the…
In his introduction to The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift in Honor of James B. Jordan , Peter Leithart says this about him: “Jordan is an unclassifiable thinker because he is an unclassifiable person . . . he closes his eyes in ecstasy listening to Messiaen or Rachmaninoff . .…
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Many Protestants still think of the Catholic church as a monolithic, uniform church. It’s been a long time since Catholics have thought of the church that way. Aloys Grillmeier sums up the results of Vatican II’s embrace of communio ecclesiology: “catholicity is understood as a union of opposites. The people…
Nicholas Rescher argues in Unknowability that there are certain things that logically cannot be known, such as “an idea that will never occur to any human being.” Prominent among unknowables are the unknowables of science. Given the way scientific research and discovery work, it is impossible for present science to…
Heaven, earth, sea: That three-decker universe is standard-issue in biblical cosmology (Exodus 20:11; Psalm 69:34; 96:11; 135:6; 146:6; Revelation 10:6). Occasionally a second heaven is added to the scheme (Nehemiah 9:6). But when the Lamb ascends to take the book, praise arises from four dimensions of creation: heaven, earth, under…
Thomas Guarino ( Vincent of Lerins ) outlines Newman’s arguments against the Vincentian canon (orthodoxy is what is taught always, everywhere, by everyone). In his Essay on Development , Newman provides historical examples “to demonstrate that the first rule is, at beast, a leaky and dubious criterion. As Newman boldly…
In his preface to Receptive Ecumenism , Paul Murray explains that the “driving assumption is that if all were to be asking and acting upon this question, even relatively independently of each other, then all would be moving, albeit somewhat unpredictably, and in such a fashion as might open up…
As Avery Dulles recounts it in The Catholicity of the Church , the reforms of Vatican II came partly from what Paul Murray calls “ receptive ecumenism ,” an ecumenism of attentive listening to the other. Dulles wasn’t exactly a receptive ecumenist himself. While acknowledging that “the Church can certainly…
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