Even while I dreamed I prayed that what I saw was only fear and no foretelling, for I saw the last known landscape destroyed for the sake of the objective, the soil bludgeoned, the rock blasted. Those who had wanted to go home would never get there now. … Every place had been displaced,…

Katherine Sonderegger confesses that Volume 2 of her Systematic Theology “is a strange book, a disorienting one, and, some would say, an impossible one” (p. xv). It is, after all, a book about the inner Life of God, as its title makes clear—The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity: Processions and Persons. Theologians have been eagerly…

“And on the banks, on both sides of the river, there will grow all kinds of trees for food. Their leaves will not wither, nor their fruit fail, but they will bear fresh fruit every month, because the water for them flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for…

“We must learn to acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we will never entirely understand it,” Wendell Berry exhorted us 50 years ago. “We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe. We must recover the sense of the majesty of creation, and the ability to be worshipful in its presence.” Since writing this,…

Our relationship to pleasure has been tormented since the serpent appeared in Eden, right after the repeated affirmation of the goodness of creation. How are we to look at trees that are good for food, a delight to the eyes, and desired to make one wise? Such trees lie in the midst of paradise, always…

In the summer of 1955, J. R. R. Tolkien wrote a letter to W. H. Auden telling of his surprise while working on The Lord of the Rings: “I met a lot of things along the way that astonished me.” This feeling, that the characters in a novel can come to carry such powerful voices…

Our triune God, in all his perfect self-awareness, revealed himself to his servant Moses as “I AM WHO I AM” (Ex. 3:14). This ontological statement has led Christian theologians throughout the history of the church to understand God as the one who is utterly other, pure act and pure being, perfectly simple, always immutable, necessarily…