37 articles from 31 issues, 1995 to 2026
Bonhoeffer was not always bold. In autumn 1933 he fled to London, weary and anxious, and Karl Barth answered with a sharp letter. Richard Burnett asks what that exchange teaches about finding courage to stand.
What is doctrine for? Seminarian Jonathan Sundermeier turns to Calvin’s Institutes to argue that theology’s highest end is piety: reverent love of God that is formed by knowing him and issues in joyful obedience.
St. Christina the Astonishing tried to flee the stench of sinners; Isaiah collapsed in terror before the Holy One. Sara Jane Nixon argues that the content of God’s holiness is love, a holiness that draws near to sinners rather than away from them.
Spiritual autobiographies remind us how the Spirit sustains faith through the long road. Drawing on Schweitzer, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Douglas F. Fletcher names ten weapons against evil and reflects on perseverance as a gift God himself secures.
Herbert's most famous poem stages a soul drawing back from divine love and the patient persistence with which Love draws it forward anyway. McDonald reads the poem alongside Herbert's pastoral writings, finding the same Reformed conviction running through both: only refusal can shut us out.
From Mark 2, Burnett walks through Christ's habit of dining with sinners and tax collectors. What does the divine yes to the wrong people require us to refuse? Especially now, in a moment when the church most wants to say yes to everything.
John Owen has become a stick used to beat people, his name shorthand for whatever kind of Reformed Christian someone wants to oppose. McDonald sets the polemics aside and reads Owen on the beatific vision, recovering a Reformed spirituality that has more to give the present than its caricatures suggest.
Pastors run spiritual formation programs without often pausing to ask what 'spirit' actually means. Vanhoozer treats that question as a load-bearing one for ministry: what we think the human spirit is shapes everything we do to form it. He follows the biblical words to a working answer.
The Reformation was as much a reform of spirituality as of theology. Old shows how Protestants moved devotion out of the cloister and into the workshop, the kitchen, the field, treating the whole of ordinary life as the place where Christians live before God.
What does humility have to do with teaching the Bible? Bryant argues: everything. The breadth and mystery of Scripture, the humility of God's self-revelation in Christ, and the limits of every interpreter all push against confident overreach in the classroom and the pulpit alike.
Today's classrooms aim to feel safe. Neder argues theology classrooms must do more than that. Christian theology is an encounter with the living God, and a class that never disturbs anyone is teaching about a different subject than the one its name says.
Ray opens with a Boy Scout sea voyage to Austria as a fifteen-year-old, the moment a curious kid first met big questions. The address builds from that memory toward an invitation: theology as combat in the best sense, the place where serious questions actually get fought through.
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