Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I grew up in the 1950s. This was before the "Sixties" and the democratization, informalization, and general cheapening of the church and her worship. Ministers were Father Donovan, Pastor Eckhart, Reverend MacPherson, Mister (Episcopal) Parker, and Brother Smith. Liturgical speech was high language, sounding kind of like the King James…
Metaphor exerts a surprisingly powerful influence within our thinking. Although it is easily dismissed as little more than a figure of speech, when we attend more closely to the ways in which we use it, metaphor’s importance swiftly becomes more apparent. Although many of our metaphors have become quite invisible…
What is a tree, scientifically speaking? A mere googling gives the following answer: “a woody perennial plant, typically having a single stem or trunk growing to a considerable height and bearing lateral branches at some distance from the ground.” We can increase detail by describing its family, genus, species and…
The majority of Western evangelical Christians rarely, if ever, fast as a form of spiritual discipline. In our culture, fasting is more connected with dieting than worship, the other side of our deeply ambiguous fascination with food. Food is everywhere. We eat more than ever before, at greater speed, and…
A Grammar of Creation An understanding of the visual-musical language of the Bible must begin with Genesis 1. This is fortunate, because when explaining biblical types to academics, as opposed to children, one is repeatedly forced to start from scratch. From birth, a healthy child is attuned to rhythm and…
In an inverse Eden, a land laid waste, one works alone tending the trash. There are none like him in all the earth, inquisitive, playful and most drawn to those mysterious, dancing bipedal creatures who lost earth and left it to go wandering the vast wilderness of space. Humans have…
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Greek and Roman Animal Sacrifice , edited by Christopher Faraone and F.S. Naiden, is divided into four sections: modern treatments of sacrifice, Greek and Roman sacrificial practice, representations in visual arts, and sacrifice in Greek comedy and tragedy. Bruce Lincoln opens with an informative survey of modern theories of sacrifice…
People who work in the tech industry pride themselves on their long hours and work ethics. It may backfire, warns Michael Thomsen. He cites studies that link sleep deprivation with declines in “divergent” thought, “weakened long-term memory, impaired decision-making abilities and lessened visuomotor performance.” “How,” Thomsen asks, “can any work…
A tidbit from E.P. Evans’s Criminal Prosecution and the Capital Punishment of Animals (18-19). “It is said that Bartholomew Chassenee, a distinguished French jurist of the sixteenth century . . . made his reputation at the bar as counsel for some rats, which had been put on trial before the…
Barbara Kowalzig ( Singing for the Gods , 5) observes that “Choral song was everywhere in the Greek world, and even if we attempt to avoid the risk of viewing the entirety of Greek civilization through the choral lens, it is nevertheless clear that dancing in the Greek khoros was…
A TLS review of two books of the Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy notes the hints of holiness in his novels: “Often in his work, however, there are residual glimmers of the numinous. McCarthy, who was raised a Roman Catholic, is often read as an unconventional religious writer, or Christian…
Stephen Walsh’s Musorgsky and His Circle tells the story of the moguchaya kuchka the “Might Little Heap” of Russian intellectuals surrounding Musorgsky - César Cui, Alexander Borodin, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Mily Balakirev. In his TLS review of the book, Paul Griffiths points to the inspiration that the circle drew from…
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