Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
If utopia is a perfect place or at least the best possible social arrangement, it must be a very dull place where any change is a change for worse and not for better, where nothing can be new and good at the same time. There can be no conflict in…
Christians, even those who say much about ‘incarnational’ faith, can say surprisingly little about the way that God claims our bodies . Perhaps this is most striking in treatments of baptism, where the intensely bodily character of the rite would especially seem to invite comment. Even if the term ‘baptism’…
Dear Pastor, I believe the locus of the difference between us is your statement here: "There are mothers who choose to risk their lives and even die to preserve the fetus, there are those who wouldn't. There are the circumstances of the individual, family, income, community, illness, risk factors, etc..…
New Year’s resolutions for weight loss are practically on the liturgical calendar of America. Somewhere around the beginning of a new year, people resolve that they will get in better shape. Some are made to feel guilty by the obesity police in our country (whose standards are, many times, very…
Click HERE for Part 1 After sending my letter to the local pastors, I received a long and thoughtful post from one of the local pastors, and it was sent not just to me, but to all of the pastors whom I e-mailed. Unfortunately, I do not feel I can…
Narrative and story have been all the rage in theology for the last few decades. The attractions are obvious. Narrative theologians favor the active, unpredictable, vibrant God of Scripture to the impersonal first principle of philosophical theology. Narrative theologians reject the notion that theologians need to justify their work by…
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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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