“The mission of the Immortality Institute is to conquer the blight of involuntary death.”¹ It may be the world’s most ambitious mission statement. But it’s a dream attracting many scientists, technologists, and futurists. These transhumanists expect that new scientific breakthroughs will allow technicians to do everything from injecting disease-fighting nanobots…

Aaron Riches. Ecce Homo: On the Divine Unity of Christ. Grand Rapids, MI: 2016. xxi + 279 pp. Ecce Homo offers a fierce resistance against any kind of separatio of the single theandric Christ, especially the modern tendency to divide the Jesus of history from the Christ of faith. Although…

(A review of the last chapter of Volume 1 in Jaroslav Pelikan’s series on the development of Christian doctrine.) Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine. Volume 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. 357 pp. In the…

Due to the towering stature of Augustine in the Latin tradition, grace and free will have been seen in opposition, or at least in significant tension, in both Roman Catholic and Protestant circles. This was never the case in the East.¹ The early Greek patristic writers universally affirmed that human…

I’ve never plagiarized a sermon before, but today I preached a message (giving due credit!) originally delivered by St. Basil the Great (330–379), theologian, liturgist, monastic reformer, and builder of (most likely) the world’s first hospital. Basil’s text is Jesus’ story, recorded Luke 12:16–21, about the rich farmer who planned…

An annotated sermon on Psalm 8 — This is an abridged, edited, and footnoted version of a 40-minute message I preached at Tbilisi International Christian Fellowship on September 12, 2021. Annotating a message like this allows me to share some of the deeper theological structure that wouldn’t be helpful to share with one’s congregation during a Sunday…

The First Book of Samuel contains a gripping collection of stories, crafted by a master narrator (or team of narrators): Hannah crying out for relief from her vicious sister-wife; David silently snipping off the robe of King Saul in the cave; the dramatic night-time visit to the witch of Endor…

Since 2018, I’ve been pastoring Tbilisi International Christian Fellowship (TICF), an international congregation of around 100 people in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. The church began in the early 1990s, soon after the collapse of Communism, as a fellowship for American missionaries. Over the years it has evolved into…

No pen, perhaps, has scrawled more energetically in the defence and exposition of traditional Christianity than that of the English writer Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936). His fertile mind expressed itself in a vast range of genres. He contributed a weekly column to The Illustrated London News for thirty years, crafted…