Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
“What’s the fastest route” he asks me as we quickly come to a stop behind a sea of red brake lights. I pull out my phone and map all the options. Every way is red with traffic backed up. Deep down I must be a small town girl because traffic…
Dear Friend of Theopolis, I have signed a stack of documents in the years since we started Theopolis, but my heart jumped a few beats as I looked at the thick lease contract. “This is real,” I thought. “This makes it really real.” Theopolis has been real for nearly three…
In the Edenic world of Perelandra, from C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, Ransom notices something about how the Green Lady treats the animals: [1] “There was in her face an authority, in her caresses a condescension, [2] which by taking seriously the inferiority of her adorers made them somehow less inferior…
In my previous two articles, I argued for the significance of the fact that baptism addresses our bodies in their objectivity. In the body, the self has an existence that runs deeper than our consciousness, decision, self-expression, and action. In washing our passive bodies, baptism seals us with an anticipatory…
Judah is a sinful nation, weighed down with iniquity. They are not the seed of Abraham, but the seed of iniquity. Their worship is abominable to Yahweh, because their hands are covered with innocent blood. They have not done good, or sought justice, or reproved the ruthless, or defended the…
Although we tend to define ourselves by our subjectivity —our perceptions, thoughts, feelings, decisions, actions—we are frequently forgetful of the objectivity of the self as body, the reality of the self that underlies and precedes all of our subjectivity. The body is the site of our ‘givenness’, where we are…
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In his introduction to Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age , James KA Smith sums up Taylor’s argument that the Reformation hastened the “disenchantment” of the world ( How (Not) To Be Secular , 38-9). Taylor’s summary of Calvin sounds like a summary of Barth: “The Reformers ‘all see the reigning…
John P. Burgess of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary spent a year with his family in Russia and recounts the experience of Russian Orthodoxy in his 2013 Encounters with Orthodoxy . It’s a very personal, sympathetic account. He describes Orthodox practices, and also some theology, in a way that I suspect an…
Willem van Asselt’s Introduction to Reformed Scholasticism provides a superb overview of the history of Reformed Scholasticism, as well as a survey of the current state of the literature. Early on, he emphasizes the “catholicity” of Reformed Scholasticism: “those who practiced it explicitly aimed to stand within the tradition of…
Benjamin Kaplan’s Divided By Faith is primarily a revisionist history of the rise of toleration in early modern Europe. He challenges the Enlightenment notion that 18th-century intellectuals introduced the idea, showing instead that toleration appeared first as a set of practices in religiously diverse regions of Europe and was first…
Lifts might not have changed everything, but they changed a lot, according to Andreas Berard’s Lifted: A Cultural History of the Elevator . The TLS reviewer observes how the elevator transformed architecture, and the class distribution of vertical space: “The lift allowed the dramatic recalibration of building types. Staircases were…
How did religion survive and revive in China? Answering that question in Religion in China , Fenggang Yang sketches the outlines of a political-economic sociology of religion. Like many sociologists of religion, he rejects the theory of secularization. Modernity has not proven to be the solvent of religious faith that…
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