When I was a novice in Biblical Studies Hans Frei’s book The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative invited me to consider not only the world that gave us the Bible but…

Slogans have always occupied our public attention, and the ways that an enemy redefines a slogan can be as important as the phrase’s original connotation.  We can learn a fair…

Taken down to their etymological components, scriptures are any written texts and literature is any human craft involving letters, usually of some alphabet or another.  But etymological roots don’t go…

 If you don’t spend much time around Biblical-studies people, the neologism “parallelomania” might be a new one on you, so let me explain: for different reasons, some writers in Biblical…

History as a practice examines the contingent.  Everything that leaves evidence of having-happened might have happened otherwise, and nothing that has come to be except that it displaced other things…

The stereotype, whether we want to dismantle it or acknowledge it, holds that those who teach college English begin a quest in graduate school to be rid of teaching writing.…

Philoctetes is not the best-known Sophocles tragedy, but its questions stick with me.  When the title character insists on his dignity as a man of war, he runs afoul of…

In our current age of social media filter bubbles, a twenty-four-hour news channel to suit any worldview, and the ability to go through an entire day without speaking to another…

On April 16, 1927, Joseph Ratzinger was born in a little village in Bavaria, Germany’s southernmost state. Raised in a Catholic family in traditionally Catholic Bavaria, it isn’t surprising that…

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…

Download or stream this episode Since the election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States in 2016, there have been countless thinkpieces seeking to explain the…

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,…