All Episodes
Lex Maligna, Lego Inferna
In Dark Sayings, I explain how Emperor Justinian stands as a striking example of imperial harlotry. Like all rulers, he filtered Scripture through his own agenda—much ...
Presence of Absence
In Isaiah, Cyrus the Great emerges as a unique figure chosen by the God of Israel to fulfill a specific historical task: the rebuilding of the Jerusalem temple and the...
Join the Rebellion
People choose personal relationships and personal fulfillment over duty. Most often, they place the latter ahead of the former, which is why you see all these ridiculo...
I Am Not a Greek
Situated opposite Galilee, the “earth” of the Gerasenes marks the site of God’s first tactical strike against Greco-Roman assimilation in Luke.The Greco-Roman rulers w...
The Liberation of the Land
In Scripture, “earth” signifies more than just physical land; it functions as a literary sign that opposes human oppression. The biblical narrative presents the land b...
Internalized Racism
In “Dark Sayings,” I explore how internalized racism destroyed my mother’s family. This psychological process, woven out of Hellenistic pluralism and anti-Scriptural p...
The Arrogance of Job
Theologians and philosophers love to talk about the meaning of life. They explore its purpose, justification, and value, questioning whether or not suffering has meani...
Sing to the Lord a New Song
In every age, empires create words to describe the people in the societies they seek to dominate and exploit. Eventually, these terms are turned inward and used agains...
Glory to the Most High
Some concepts in the Bible are so crucial that if they aren’t properly understood from the outset, the text itself can be twisted from a guide that protects your steps...
Forget, Lest You Forget
What is it like to be unaffected?How sad it must be to go to church, attend a class, interact with your neighbor, and be indifferent to what they say.What is it like t...
It's Literature
This week, Fr. Paul reminds us that a word does not carry meaning yet the words of Scripture make God’s instruction accessible. Likewise, it is the words of God to whi...
It's Personal
When people hear Luke 8:18, they assume it is talking about stuff.But Luke, like the Book of Job, is not about stuff.It is about darkness and light.When people evaluat...
May God Cover Us
Most people, when they hear the story of Josiah and his priest rummaging through the rubble of the temple in Jerusalem and stumbling upon a scroll, fall prey to the ho...
God is the Light
Evil always dresses in a garment of light. It hides in plain sight. It smiles. It’s friendly. It’s comforting. It’s dishonest. It appears as something it’s not.Take, f...
God Is Not Shy
It has taken some time to understand what the Parable of the Sower meant when it introduced the function “soil” in its critique of human beings’ betrayal of God’s cove...
And of My Descendants?
In Scripture, Abraham’s seed encompasses more than just biological lineage. It also transmits God’s covenant, outlining the potential for righteousness and human corru...
They Built Themselves High Places
“He who is not with me is against me; and he who does not gather with me, scatters.” (Luke 11:23)Mothers, not women—mothers specifically—are exploited by the schemes o...
To the Text
In this episode, Fr. Paul stresses the importance of going to the biblical text, not “going back, ” highlighting how Paul’s letters and even Luke’s Gospel were written...
Do You See?
We imagine that love is the product of a kind or generous heart. We confuse love with sentiment. Maybe we want others to like us. Perhaps we can’t stomach their suffer...
I’m Your Lily
When the text says “recline” in Greek, it doesn’t mean “recline.” When the Greek text differentiates “recline” through repetition, it still doesn’t mean “recline,” eve...
God Has Spoken
In their extreme hubris, humans believe that Luke’s admonition, “A tree is known by its fruit,” is nothing more than a proverb about being a “better parent.” But as I ...
God is Sufficient
A single, passing word is easily overlooked in translation. You could pontificate about it in abstraction, but can you observe its importance, its technicality? Of cou...
A Greek Tragedy Takes Flesh—and Still Dwells Among Us
The Odyssey narrates Odysseus’s ten-year journey as the king of Ithaca, during which he attempts to return home after the fall of Troy. Virgil’s Aeneid chronicles the ...
Alexander's Seed
This week, Fr. Paul reiterates the importance of hearing Scripture within its historical and sociopolitical context. Beginning with Alexander the Great’s quest for div...
A Stranger and a Sojourner in the Land
What does it take to liberate people from exceptionalism? To liberate a teaching? Such a pernicious snare, that saying of yours, “family first.” It was your fear of l...
The Only Vote That Counts
Elitist intellectuals are drawn to the concept of a psychological trap because others’ suffering entertains them and because their perception of another's supposed tra...
Sola Syntaxis and the Honorable Man
The folly of human construction is similar to that of large language models. Noam Chomsky talks about this in his famous critique of the current state of artificial in...
Canon Disrupted
This week, Fr. Paul underscores how the Septuagint’s different ordering and classification of texts impact our ability to hear the words of God correctly, shifting Chr...