I’ve spent a fair amount of time reflecting on Timon Cline’s fascinating article from last year, “The School of Churchmen.” In particular, Timon raises an important question that, I think, all Christians would benefit from pondering at least once in a while: What should seminaries be for? This question is particularly interesting to me because it’s one that I repeatedly asked myself when I was researching seminaries for my master’s degree. Speaking from my (admittedly

I faced the first weeks and months of the COVID-19 crisis with a combination of steely eyed defiance and glib dismissiveness. The media never lets a crisis go to waste, I said, and this was just another lost Malaysian airliner on which CNN was capitalizing. I blamed social media for contributing to hysteria, and for promulgating false information. I cited statistics about how many people die from the flu in America (80,000 in 2019) and

In Genesis 1, God creates the animals of the sea and sky on the fifth day and subsequently creates land animals on the sixth. On this same day God also forms a certain kind of land animal in God’s own image and likeness—humankind (Gen 1:26-27). As with the animals of land, sea, and sky, humans are told to “be fruitful and multiply,” but then receive a unique set of instructions from God: “Fill the earth

When Israel was in Egypt’s land, Let my people go; Oppressed so hard they could not stand, Let my people go; Go down Moses, ‘way down in Egypt’s land. Tell ole Pharaoh Let my people go. -An African American Spiritual Liberation theology began as a theological discipline in the 1950s and 1960s in South America as theologians like Leonardo Boff, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Juan Luis Segundo, and Jon Sobrino applied Christian theological insights to the realities

“’Good’ and ‘bad,’ applied to them, are words without content: For it is from them that the content of these words is henceforward to be derived.” –C.S. Lewis, Abolition of Man In Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis explains the nonsense of a subjective postmodern philosophy, wherein truth has no meaning. When one accepts that truth is a social construct rather than an objective correspondence to reality, the words ‘good’ and ‘bad’ no longer hold meaning,

James Cone states at the beginning of his paradigm-altering first book, Black Theology and Black Power, that he writes with “the attitude of an angry Black man” but also with “a certain dark joy.”1 Why does he simultaneously name these experiences, anger and joy, that are seemingly in conflict with one another? And what is it that makes his joy dark? I argue that Cone names his joy as dark, not because it is evil

The past month or so has seen the virtual world ablaze with comments about another high profile, evangelical-Catholic ecumenical…what shall I call it…‘incident.’ I am normally loathe to chime in on such occasions of internet natter. Only rarely do I judge them worthy of notice, rarer still do I find them worthy of attention. Perhaps rarest of all do I judge myself as having anything of worth to add. But the case of influential Protestant,

Niels Hemmingsen, On the Law of Nature: A Demonstrative Method, trans. E. J. Hutchinson (Sources in Early Modern Economics, Ethics, and Law, 2nd Series, Grand Rapids: CLP Academic, 2018), 202 pp. Over the past couple of decades or so, there has been a remarkable surge of interest in post-Reformation Reformed theology, with a particular emphasis on republishing previously untranslated primary sources. A natural result of this trend has been an accompanying enthusiasm for assessing early

A few months ago, I penned a piece encouraging contemporary Christians not to abandon the distinctive—if somewhat arcane—lyricism of the King James Bible. In the course of my argument, I mentioned Mark Ward’s recent book Authorized: The Use and Misuse of the King James Bible, which argues that the modern church should migrate toward the use of more accessible translations. Ward himself was gracious enough to show up in the comments section of that piece,