Some people have rejected Christmas and Easter because of their origins. But the examples of the standing stone and bronze serpent shed light on whether a practice is “pagan” in God’s eyes.

Many of us miss the fact the flood story gives a profound answer to one of the most difficult questions posed by philosophers today: how a good God can tolerate human evil in the world.

In Walter Ong’s classic book Orality and Literacy, he shares a fascinating theory about why our modern Western culture thinks so differently than the way the Bible does. Eastern thinking, like what you find in the Old Testament, is very concrete and image-oriented, and it uses stories and parables to explain rather than abstract logic. […]