Topics Index
Everything published in THE THRESHOLD is tagged. Use this page to find writing on a specific subject, or to explore the range of what this newsletter covers.
Primary Topic Tags
The Bible did not arrive in a vacuum, and neither did the church that formed around it. This tag covers close reading of Scripture — particularly the ways the earliest Christians read their texts — as well as engagement with the patristic tradition: Ignatius, Irenaeus, Athanasius, the Cappadocians, Augustine, Chrysostom, and the councils that translated centuries of argument into settled confession. The assumption here is that the early church was working on problems that are still our problems.
Church Health & Reformation
The Western church is, by most measures, in trouble — and the analysis of that trouble is frequently worse than the trouble itself. This tag covers institutional health, denominational movements, pastoral formation, church discipline, the theology of reform, and what it might mean to renew something rather than merely replace it.
Christian faith makes claims about reality — which means it has something to say about what is happening in the world. This tag covers the news, cultural trends, and public life read through a theological lens. The goal is not partisan commentary but theological attentiveness: learning to see what is actually at stake in the events that fill our feeds.
Pop Culture & Longing
Stories, films, music, and art that are not explicitly Christian often carry more honest longing for transcendence than work that is. This tag takes seriously the theological freight of popular culture — the hunger for meaning embedded in the stories a society chooses to tell itself, the grief encoded in its entertainment, the eschatology implicit in its blockbusters.
The Global Church
The center of world Christianity has shifted. The majority of Christians now live in Africa, Asia, and Latin America — and the church in those places has been reading the Bible, suffering for it, and thinking hard about it in ways the Western church largely has not noticed. This tag is an ongoing attempt to pay attention: to theologians from the Global South, to persecuted communities in China, Iran, and the Horn of Africa, to the diaspora churches forming in the Persian Gulf.
Formation & Interior Life
The Christian life is not only public argument and institutional concern. It is also prayer, silence, repentance, Scripture reading, the sacraments, and the slow transformation of a self that resists transformation. This tag covers spiritual formation, contemplative practice, ascetic theology, the traditions of the desert fathers and mothers, and the ordinary interior struggle of trying to be a Christian person on a normal Tuesday.
Secondary Tags
These tags appear across all primary categories. They mark a specific sub-topic within a broader piece and can be used to find writing on a particular subject.
Discipleship — What it means to follow Jesus in a specific time, place, and life circumstance.
Leadership — Pastoral, institutional, and lay leadership: its theology, its failure modes, and its proper limits.
Preaching — The theology and craft of proclamation.
Sacraments — Baptism, the Lord's Supper, and the broader sacramental imagination of the church.
Worship — Liturgy, music, corporate prayer, and the theology of what the gathered church does together.
Ethics — Moral theology: what Christian faith asks of us in the concrete decisions of ordinary life.
Eschatology — The doctrine of last things — the serious theological claim that history is going somewhere, and that the resurrection changes how we live now.