Everyone agrees that shame is a terrible feeling. So isn’t it logical that we should avoid feeling shame? And doesn’t that also mean that it’s bad to make other people…

In the context of Christian theology, what is Tradition? And what is it for? Is it a unified, monolithic body of doctrines, from which we deviate at our peril? Is…

While Baptists may profess the unity of God’s Church, we are also Dissenters from way back, ready to die on the hill of our unshakeable convictions. Still, the vision of…

Baptists have an odd relationship with the Christian tradition. Some of their most distinctive beliefs and practices seem difficult to square with the views of other Christian communions past and…

Download or Stream this Episode In academic philosophy over the last century or so, the various thinkers in French and German and Slovenian traditions, even those who do not live…

Download or Stream this Episode Biblical Studies can’t seem to figure out what to do with the Greeks.  One voice warns against Platonizing influences on Christian theology, and another calls…

Download or Stream this Episode When we read the New Testament, its epistles and narratives and apocalyptic visions give us a vivid picture of life, the world, a cosmic mission. …

Download or Stream this Episode “Two men walking up a hill/ one disappears, and one’s left standing still.”  Whether someone hears that first as a Larry Norman melody or, like…

Download or Stream this Episode The Gifford Lectures have always taken as their project to “promote and diffuse the study of natural theology in the widest sense of the term,”…

Download or Stream this Episode Twenty years ago, when I was in seminary, I read all about idolatry: I learned that it only became a meaningful category when Israel emerged…

Download or Stream this Episode “The best thing that one can do with a Bible is to read it.”  That’s one of the proverbial words I remember from my beloved…

Download or Stream this Episode When I teach the text of Job in college classrooms, what students will tell me before we start reading, with only a bit of variation,…

Download or Stream this Episode In his famous essay “On the Reading of Old Books” C.S. Lewis praises the texts of ages past not because they were so often right–none…

Throughout her long history, Christ’s Church has been united and divided by words. For that reason, our creeds and confessions often have mixed reputations: they are the pure apostolic tradition;…

What is a monk? The word evokes the image of a man robed and cowled, tonsured in the West, bearded in the East. It recalls the architecture of the monastery,…