Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The story of Judges 19 and the subsequent chapters are some of the most shocking and appalling accounts in all of Scripture. The callousness of the old host and the Levite, and the monstrous brutality of the men of Gibeah, leaves us feebly scrabbling for words by which to surmount…
David has become king. He has conquered the capital city of Jerusalem. He has brought the ark of Yahweh into the city and placed it in a tent. He has stationed Levites at the tent to offer sacrifices of praise. An anomaly hits him: He has a cedar-paneled palace, and…
In Part 2 of this series we traced what we have of the development of the epiclesis in the liturgy of the Church. In this third and final part we’ll look at the theological implications of this and how we may apply what we’ve learned. As we saw in Part…
In a 2014 piece published in First Things , I offered a "wish list" for Protestant churches, a checklist for a future catholic Protestantism. The wish list doesn't cover everything. It doesn't mention those things that Protestants, especially Evangelicals, already do, often exceedingly well, things like missions and evangelism and…
In the first part of this series we examined the meaning of “blessing” in Scripture and its parallels in Jewish liturgical tradition, but did not find anything that we could properly call an epiclesis (an invocation of the Holy Spirit). We did find examples of invocation of Jesus to “come”…
When the Aaronic priests were ordained, the blood of the ram of "filling” was placed on the lobe of the right ear, the right thumb, and the right big toe (Lev. 8:22-24). Similarly, the cleansing rite for a leper included smearing the right ear lobe, thumb, and big toe with…
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In The Second Shift (19), Arlie Hochschild points out that “the interplay between a man’s gender ideology and a woman’s implies a deeper interplay between his gratitude toward her, and hers toward him. For how a person wants to identify himself or herself influences what, in the back and forth…
Alexander Murray reviews Ronald Witt’s The Two Latin Cultures and the Foundation of Renaissance Humanism in Medieval Italy in the TLS , and has some high compliments for this sequel to In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni . He commends, for example,…
John 4: Whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give shall become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life. Jesus is never far from water. He turns water to wine, heals a paralytic at…
In many churches, the Sunday after Epiphany commemorates the baptism of Jesus. It is one of the moments when He shows Himself to the world. At the water, the Father declares Jesus to be His Son by giving the Spirit of sonship. When we were baptized, we received a share…
Prior to Cyril, McGuckin claims ( Saint Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy , 224-5), Christian theology oscillated between an unstable “semitic” anthropology that understood human nature as a fragile, unstable combination of soul and flesh, and a philosophical “hellenistic” view that claimed that man was not truly anything…
John McGuckin dissents strongly from the notion that Cyril of Alexandria failed to do justice to the “full humanity” of Jesus ( Saint Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy , 225-6). On the contrary, for Cyril, Jesus was the first fully human human. Denial that Cyril did justice to…
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