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Spending Lent with people in recovery
In the company of church members in recovery from addiction, I’m feeling more open to the doctrine of original sin.
Sloth in a bathrobe
Does weariness of the soul make us apathetic toward what is good?
The theological anthropologies implicit in our politics
David Zahl maps the conservative/liberal binary according to distinctions between high and low anthropologies.
The ultrarich and their total depravity
The White Lotus is part of a growing subgenre that probes extreme wealth as moral deformity.
Sin is like a suitcase abandoned at the baggage claim
Lent beckons us to claim those forgotten things we’d packed away.
Maybe this really is a time of divine judgment
Amid pandemic and protest, will we turn to each other and live?
How I learned to love the doctrine of total depravity
When unremitting human sin is something I expect, I can face evil without despair.
Take & read: New books in theology
To speak words of grace, we must first name the powers and principalities that hold us captive.
selected by Jason Micheli
When Christian practice (de)forms us
Do practices make us better people? Lauren Winner isn't so sure.
Take & read: New books in New Testament
Can we read scripture critically and theologically at the same time?
selected by Joshua Jipp
N. T. Wright’s creative reconstruction of Paul and his world
Wright tells a great story. Would the apostle recognize it?
I was an elementary-school pickpocket
Thirty years later my petty crime came back to haunt me.
Why are the “good guys with guns” so sure they're good?
"It's a sin problem," goes the slogan, "not a gun problem." Whatever definition of sin is operative here, it isn't Paul's.
Alienated from our own beauty
Sin distorts the reciprocity for which God made us.
February 14, Ash Wednesday (Joel 2:1-2, 12-17; Psalm 51:1-17)
There are two sure things in life: death and sin.
The Boston Declaration and God’s monstrous entourage
People do terrible things. So does the biblical God. Is there value in naming those things?
Writing about the Amish without romance
“I tried to remember that these are human beings, not caricatures.”
Elizabeth Palmer interviews David Williams
Faith is formed in us by the Spirit and the life of the church. It renews our elemental confidence and creates our disposition toward the world.
Far from being meaningless slights with minimal harm, microagressions intrude on the spiritual lives of those who are already marginalized and oppressed.