Essays
You Are What You Believe: How the Creed Defines Our Identity in Relation to God, Ourselves, and Others
Ancient Christian confessions like the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed define the boundaries and content of the Christian faith in accordance with Scripture. But they also function as essential identity formation. These creeds are much more than checklists of personal beliefs [...]
From the smallest insect to the greatest monster of the deep, from the weakest child to the mightiest of men, no creature can exist without God’s word, and without God’s word there is no life and salvation. God’s word does what it says [...]
Our world today is marked by something so obvious we miss just how peculiar it is: the existence of another world that is both “in and not of” our physical world. Not because the other world is purely spiritual; I’m speaking about the existence of the digital realm. [...]
In the late 1590s, before he became chaplain to King James, a translator of the Authorized Version, a British delegate to the Synod of Dordt, or Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, Samuel Ward was a twenty-something student at Christ College [...]
I recently spoke with a younger friend who is battling cancer, which has included a great deal of pain. We had not spoken for a while, and I was struck by the change in his voice when he answered the phone [...]
Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an unlimited variety of ways. Yet it is never viewed with indifference: beauty demands to be noticed [...]
As we look around at the general troubles of the world and at the specific trials we face in our own contexts—ravaging wars, ethnic strife, poverty, pandemic, and persecution—we may wonder if God is really reigning [...]
Part question, part protest, the plaintive cry “Are we there yet?” punctuates any family vacation worth talking about. Clearly, we’re not where we were, but we also haven’t arrived [...]
The feel of dirt mattered to Wolfgang Musculus. Common dust and clay and grass accompanied many of his formative experiences like sod stuck to a child’s knee. [...]
The last few years have seen a global pandemic, civil unrest, and increased political division. These miasmas of polarization, alienation, and apathy have been accompanied by stranger trends […]
When I was growing up, my father had a rather extensive collection of 78 RPM records, the ones made of shellac in the first half of the twentieth century before vinyl took over. […]
Going Upstream of Streaming Worship: Embracing Creaturely Limits in an Age of Autonomy and Disembodiment
Online worship. Zoom church. Streaming services on Facebook Live (if you can get it to actually work). We’re all used to this strange new world by now. But it can get stranger […]
A crushed spirit dries up the bones. (Prov. 17:22) He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree. (1 Pet. 2:24) Technology’s triumph over space, its power to entertain and distract, its promise of enabling us to construct not only our own virtual identities but our own realities […]
If there were a silver lining to the dark cloud of the recent COVID-19 restrictions, it would be that we were compelled to think about our bodies: what to put on them, what to put in them, how proximate to other bodies to place them. […]
Outside the Catholic vicar-general’s house in Geneva, a large mob of priests congealed in the thin sunlight one autumn morning in 1532. Inside, Guillaume Farel, the French Protestant missionary who had stopped in Geneva, was summoned to answer the accusations of ten canons of the cathedral chapter. […]
