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Psychologist Dacher Keltner has spent years studying what happens to us in the presence of something vast: a night sky, a grove of towering trees, a waterfall. He calls it the “small self.” Awe, it turns out, shrinks our sense of importance, how central we feel to the story. And that shrinking, strangely, makes us better people. It softens the…

Luke tells us that the town of Emmaus was seven miles from Jerusalem. What he does not tell us is in what direction. Nearly two thousand years later, archaeologists and historians still disagree. There are several candidate sites: Emmaus Nicopolis, a significant Roman town, sits about twenty miles from Jerusalem, which is too far to match Luke’s account. Abu Ghosh,…

Pontius Pilate was the Roman prefect of Judea. Prefects in the provinces operated under considerable pressure. Their job was to keep order, collect taxes, and prevent uprisings. A riot or rebellion on their watch was a career-ending and sometimes life-ending event. Public sentencing in the Roman world was a civic spectacle, conducted before a crowd with a genuine stake in…

Some biblical words show up all over the place: love, justice, mercy. But others appear only once or twice, leaving translators and theologians scratching their heads. Take ephod. Usually, it means a priestly garment. But in the story of Gideon, it becomes something else entirely. Was it a statue? An idol? Some kind of sacred bling? We are not told.…

Esther is one of the most unusual books in the Bible. It reads less like scripture and more like a Persian court thriller: palace intrigue, a hidden identity, a genocidal villain, and a last-minute reversal that saves an entire people. It is also one of only two books in the Bible that never mentions God by name. And yet the…

Most of us skip genealogies. A list of names with no story attached feels like the Bible's way of testing our commitment. But the genealogy at the end of Ruth is doing something remarkable. For four chapters we have been absorbed in an intimate story: two widows, a generous farmer, a small town in Bethlehem. The stakes have felt personal…

In ancient Israel, when a man died and left behind a widow with no sons, she was in serious trouble. Without a male relative to protect her, she had no legal standing, no means of support, and no future to speak of. The kinsman redeemer was the cultural and legal answer to that problem. A close male relative could step…

In Christian theology, the word providence is used to describe how God interacts with the universe. It asks a deceptively simple question: what does God actually do? As with most questions of theology, Christians disagree sharply about the answer. At one end, some traditions hold that God is the ultimate author of every event, down to the smallest detail. Nothing…

Ruth is one of the shortest books in the Bible and one of the most beautifully written. In four chapters and with three main characters, it tells a story that moves from devastating loss to unexpected restoration. The setting is ancient Israel during the time of the judges, a notoriously dark period in the biblical narrative. Against that backdrop, a…

The biblical tradition has never treated youth as a waiting room for adulthood. Samuel was a child when he first heard God’s voice calling in the night. He didn’t recognize it at first, kept running to the priest Eli. But God was not waiting until Samuel was older or more qualified. David was a young shepherd, the youngest of his…