Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Optimism is “an inclination to put the most favorable construction upon actions and events or to anticipate the best possible outcome.” 1 On the other hand, pessimism is “an inclination to emphasize adverse aspects, conditions, and possibilities or to expect the worst possible outcome.” We can see that optimism and…
If we wish to understand the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, we must begin with seeing them as a part of the creational order. Trees, along with plants and seed-bearing things, come to life by the word of God as part of…
“I chant slips and irreversible disasters, wiltings, failures, scars, the little disappointments and the large, blue streaks down a world that wishes it was only suncolors.” Paul J. Pastor from Kintsugi Song I recently lost something very valuable. Something I’d had for years and used every day. But, it wasn’t…
In his eponymous book, Jonah follows an exodus pattern. He travels through the waves and east of the city into the wilderness. On a first reading, it looks like another use of this common literary shape in the Old Testament: salvation through the waters of death and the wilderness of…
“Everyone serves the good wine first, and when people have drunk freely, then the poor wine. But you have kept the good wine until now.” The unknowing master of ceremonies didn’t know how right he was. We see this play out in John’s apocalypse. The end is like the beginning,…
Read in isolation, The Test of Adultery (Num 5:11-31) presents the reader with a seemingly bizarre ritual, conjuring up ideas bordering on the Salem Witch Trials. Beyond this, pressing questions linger—such as, “Why is the woman in particular singled out, while no test is provided for the husband of a…
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Terry Eagleton is always fun to read, and his TLS review of the correspondence of Paul Auster and JM Coetzee ( Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011) ) is no exception. He begins: “”t is a Romantic delusion to suppose that writers are likely to have something of interest to say…
Joe Rigney of Bethlehem College and Seminary describes a strategy for Christians in the culture wars at the Trinity House site.
In his Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values: A New Attempt Toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism (Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy) , Max Scheler describes the modern attitude that he finds at the heart of the Kantian system: “This ‘attitude’ I can only…
Karol Wojtyla in full anti-Kantian mode ( Love and Responsibility , 125-6): Persons are essentially self-mastering, sui juris , “and cannot be ceded to another or supplanted by another in another in any context where it must exercise its will or make a commitment affecting its freedom.” OK, so that…
“That man is a ‘body’ belongs more deeply to the structure of the personal subject than the fact that in his somatic constitution he is also male or female.” So says John Paul II in Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology Of The Body (157). How does he…
Given the recent history of American conservatism, it comes as something of a shock to realize that conservatives expressed dismay at 20th century developments in military technology. In an essay on “To Whom is the Poet Responsible?” (in The Man of Letters in the Modern World: Selected Essays: 1928-1955 )…
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