Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
"The faithful use of sacraments, and indeed a fully sacramental view of creation, is vital to the life of the Church. Baptism and the Lord's Supper are rites that directly shape the community and the Body, because they were given by God for that express purpose. A deficient practice of…
Weightlessness is fun. At the beginning of Gravity (2013) , we can see one astronaut dancing the Macarena and another one playing with his jetpack. They like it out there in the space. Apart from zero-gravity they can enjoy beautiful views, and even the silence is likable, although Matt Kowalski…
I recently went to a lunch that is more or less quarterly. About a dozen of us go. It is a lunch held in honor of a retired professor of religion and philosophy. I have been one of his acquaintances for more than 40 years. In his tenure as professor,…
Why Theopolis? Don't we already have seminaries and Bible colleges and other institutions for theological education? Why do we need another one? I get this question now and again. I ask myself this question even more often. What follows is a partial answer. Back in the 1990s, seminaries seemed to…
I think the logic of the Lutheran Reformation can be summarized in one sentence, attributed to Luther himself: "God does not need your good works, but your neighbor does." The first half of that statement is justification by faith . God doesn't need our works to satisfy his justice or…
If you are looking to start a fight with Christians, there is hardly a better subject to do so than the arts. Music, movies, paintings, and literature have provided no small battlegrounds for Christians to war. We are emotionally invested in the arts. A song, a book, or a film…
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One of Handel’s go-to techniques was “madrigalism,” which took its name from its use in Renaissance madrigals. Calvin Stapert defines madrigalism as “imitation of a word or phrase by the music - for example, an ascending scale on the word ‘climb,’ fast notes on ‘run,’ a sharp dissonance on ‘pain’”…
In one of the essays in The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States , Gordon Wood notes that American policy concerning the Western frontier “rested on the assumption that settlement of the western territories would be neat and orderly.” If wasn’t. Far from it: “The…
Between the end of the nineteenth century and the 1970s, the US engaged in a series of Asian wars. They were “not separate and unconnected,” as often believed, argue Michael Hunt and Steven Levine in Arc of Empire: America’s Wars in Asia from the Philippines to Vietnam . Rather, “they…
Dubai came to the world’s attention only a few years ago, writes Daniel Brook in A History of Future Cities . It looked like an unprecedented miracle: “The instant global metropolis with a ‘skyline on crack’ captivated the world with record-setting skyscrapers, indoor ski slopes, and a stunningly diverse population.…
I offer some thoughts on Pentecost, Babel, and Enlightenment at Firstthings.com this morning.
In her contribution to Last Things: Death and the Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (The Middle Ages Series) , Anna Harrison concludes that “Bernard [of Clairvaux’s] conception of community among the saints in heaven is limited” (204). She elaborates: “Although he does talk about common experience among the saints and…
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