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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Scott Swain’s question in The God of the Gospel: Robert Jenson’s Trinitarian Theology is about “the relationship between God’s being and God’s self-determination between the Trinity and election, between God’s unfailing character and God’s unfolding covenant that reaches its climax in the gospel of Jesus Christ” (14). The question is…
OK, so it’s old, but Geoffrey O’Brien’s NYRB review of Malick’s The Tree Of Life is one of the best things I’ve come across. A few highlights. “An aroma of Freudian family romance pervades the film like a cloud of slightly acrid perfume, and Malick (who has written a screenplay…
Yes, answers Charles Taylor ( Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays , 50-1). But how? Taylor suggests there are three facets to mystery: (1) It refers to something we cannot explain; (2) it refers to something that we cannot explain that also is “something of great depth and moment”; and (3),…
Benedict XVI’s God’s Word: Scripture, Tradition, Office has some very good things to say, and some very questionable things. The good first. Christ, he emphasizes, is revelation, and the presence of revelation is the presence of Christ. Scripture presents this presence in two ways. First, the presence of Christ is…
Paul Barker’s review Carscapes: The Motor Car, Architecture, and Landscape in England in the TLS highlights the effect on the automobile on architecture and urban design. The authors “quote the historian Jack Simmons, in 1947, seeing his adoptive city, Leicester, stripped of its past in pursuit of engineers’, planners’ and…
Machen was not one to pussyfoot about theological differences. But he also recognized the chasm that lay between Catholoicism and Protestant liberalism ( Christianity and Liberalism ): “Far more serious still is the division between the Church of Rome and evangelical Protestantism in all its forms. Yet how great is…
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