Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
(Genesis 37:2 – 50:26) A. Generations of Jacob, 37:2a B. Joseph hated by brothers, 37:2b C. Jacob’s discriminatory blessing, 37:3-4 D. Rule over family: vision, 37:5-11 E. Joseph seeks brothers, 37:12-17 F. Joseph "killed," 37:18-36 G. Judah’s sin, ch. 38 H. Imprisonment, though undeserved, ch. 39-40 I. Famine and Pharaoh,…
Moses and Jesus The gift of the Father is a son, but we must be ready to give our sons back to Him when it is time. The gift of the Brother is an estate, but we must be ready to give our estates back to Him when it is…
An Exposition of Chapter XXV of the Westminster Confession of Faith I. The Catholic or universal Church, which is invisible, consists of the whole number of the elect, that have been, are, or shall be gathered into one, under Christ the head thereof; and is the spouse, the body, the…
From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Critics , by David Gress (New York: Free Press, 1998). This book came into my hands after I had finished my series of essays on Western Civilization. It is so good that I was tempted to summarize it in…
In a recent issue of the Chalcedon Report (March, 1999), R. J. Rushdoony praises Patrick Buchanan’s book The Great Betrayal (Boston: Little Brown, 1998), a defense of protectionism. Rushdoony claims that the conflict between free trade and tariffs is a religious conflict, and he is correct. Unfortunately and surprisingly, he…
Joseph and Esther The third patriarch was Joseph, and the third phase of pre-gospel history is the Restoration. We have not spent time looking particularly at the Joseph narrative heretofore, because it is different in cast from the Abraham and Jacob ones. There is no explicit promise, fulfillment, and crisis…
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Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process traces modern standards of disgust and cleanliness to the development of court society during the Renaissance. Drawing on Elias, William Miller ( Anatomy of Disgust ) suggests sensitivity to disgust and being civilized are directly proportional. Martha Nussbaum ( Hiding from Humanity , 115-6) disagrees…
In his brilliant Earthly Powers (3), Michael Burleigh cites a passage from Tocqueville’s book on the French Revolution. Taking a note from Schiller about “how early modern religious wars spilled across political boundaries, which reminded Tocqueville of the ideological struggle between Jacobins and counter-revolutionaries in late-eighteenth-century Europe,” Tocqueville drew a…
Semyon Frank was a Russian emigre to London. Michael Burleigh ( Sacred Causes , 39) sums up his life: “Born in 1877 into a Russian-Jewish family, he had quickly outgrown a juvenile Marxism, converting to Orthodox Christianity in 1912, on the ground that the Jewish God was as remote from…
Our secular age can be sustained only if the secular has been carefully distinguished from the sacred, and only if the boundary between the two is vigorously, not to say violently, guarded. But boundary-drawing between the sacred and profane is the work of a priest. It is the sacred act…
Hugh Grady opens his Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics (6-10) with a brief and illuminating discussion of Kant’s aesthetics of purity. By “pure” here is meant the freedom of aesthetic experience from cognitive reason and teleological judgments, from practical or moral interests. This disinterested experience of art is an encounter with…
Jonathan Klawans is a great one for cutting through nonsense. In his Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple , he points to the oddity that “documents composed three, four, or even five centuries after the destruction are labeled as delayed responses to the destruction. . . the suggestion that it took…
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