Category: Theology and Practice
The Book of Revelation is for the Church
Timothy Beal. The Book of Revelation: A Biography. Lives of Great Religious Books. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. $26.95, 288 pp. First things first: Let me state my disagreement with two premises of Timothy Beal’s “biography” of the Book of...
Our Fugitive Senses and Sensibilities
Throughout the archaeological, biological, and literary records of homo sapiens emerges a common trait: the species best capable of lifting eyes and mind heavenward has not found this earth to be enough. However murkily understood, the great mounds of earth...
Marriage as Moral Orthodoxy
As evangelicals watch megachurches and other institutions wobble in their convictions about marriage, we have sought to buttress support by elevating the traditional view of the doctrine to a matter of orthodoxy. Always up for a good statement — or...
A Missionary Encounter with the West: A Guide to Lesslie Newbigin
Lesslie Newbigin has been characterized by a leading church historian as “probably the most influential British theologian of the twentieth century.”[1] He spent 40 years in India as a missionary. When he returned to Europe, he had fresh eyes to...
On Christian Hope
Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God. — Psalm 90:1–20 I have often...
Forget “Enchantment”: In Praise of the Spooky
Thomas Merton concretized a sentiment many of us share and have found ourselves unable to articulate: “October is a fine and dangerous season in America. It is dry and cool and the land is wild with red and gold and...
We All Have the Power of Caligula Now
The logic, spirit, and economy of contemporary pornography is a near-perfect reflection of society’s failure to provide us with the tools necessary to meet the Responsibilities of Self-Belonging. Pornography assumes that we are each our own and belong to ourselves....
A Numbing Blow: Baptism as Illiberalism
“The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers,” wrote the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan. He was pointing out in his inimitable way how the course of our lives unfold from an act over...
The Bottoming Out of the American Evangelical Church
The long shadow of 2016 continues to stretch over the church. I recently attended a social event held outdoors. Masking was the most immediately visible demarcation of political lines among a large group of professing Christians; but behind the masks,...
Sailing and the Christian Life
“But here and there it shines out with a great and flashing beauty, like a light set upon a high place above the stormy or tranquil waters where we voyage. And the sceptic will say: is the beacon for me,...