The Dread of Dust: Human Bodies and the Life of the World to Come

Tempted: I see that I must be placed in the ground and reduced to dust. A bed will be spread out for my body in the grave and therefore I said to that place of rottenness, ‘You are my father,’ and to the worms, ‘You are my mother and sister’ (Job 17:14). Comforter: Do not…
Human Persons: Bodies, Souls, and Emergentism

“Then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.” Almost hidden within the Genesis creation account stands this singular sentence about God’s creation of humankind. Revealed is God’s creative act; implied is the dual nature of…
The Priesthood of All Humanity: James Arcadi on Human Uniqueness and Commonality

“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion . . . ” Thus, every reader of the Christian Scriptures is presented with this design and purpose framework to understand humanity. The Genesis account includes both the uniqueness—from other created things—and the commonality—in form and function—of all humans. Christian…
Life in the Anthropocene:
Christian Theology and Climate Change

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,…
Designed to Attend: Christina Bieber Lake on Literature, God, and Science

“We are our attention.” So says Daniel Siegal, clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and executive director of the Mindsight Institute. This “stunning claim,” as she calls it, has captured Christina Bieber Lake’s attention. “We are in a unique time when it comes to things clamoring for our attention,” says Lake,…
Creaturely Awe and the Wonder of Creation

“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,…
Natural Desire, Moral Indexes, and Pleasure According to Paul

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…
Perceiving the Good: Creation, Nature, and Normativity

“God saw that it was good.” As reported by Saint Augustine, the Manichees latched onto the peculiarity of this refrain in the opening chapter of Genesis to criticize the received Christian doctrine of creation. Read in a certain light, it seems to suggest that either God didn’t know what he was going to make before…
Paul, Positive Psychology, and the Good Life

“The divorce of the natural and moral universes is perhaps the worst legacy of the Enlightenment, and the most urgent challenge facing modern humankind.” So said British theologian Colin Gunton 35 years ago. One might reasonably claim that little progress has been made over the last quarter century. Ideas like meaning, value, and purpose are…
The Author of an Autonomous Creation: Chance, Providence, and Divine Action

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…
Carving Creation at the Joints: Resourcing the Aristotelian Revival

Remarking on the natural human propensities toward both pride and ease, Francis Bacon observed “A man will become attached to one particular science and field of investigation either because he thinks he was its author and inventor or because he has worked hard on it and become habituated to it.” This strikes most of us…
Carolingian in My Mind: Divine Foreknowledge, Action, and Contingency in the Ninth Century

The rise of the Carolingian Empire (ca. 800–888 AD) witnessed an abundance of theological and philosophical inquiry and controversy, not least because the relative political stability made connections across geographical regions easier, along with a widespread effort by its authorities to promote educational and religious reforms and thus to develop greater uniformity in Christian thought…