Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Why there is more to Jephthah than meets than eye It was not that long ago that I realized the Jephthah-story and the Jesus-story were basically the same story. Sounds crazy, I know. But here is a one-paragraph synopsis of both: The people of God have gone their own way,…
G.K. Chesterton famously said that the Gospels don’t reveal Jesus’ mirth. It’s true we never catch Jesus laughing. But can we believe He never did? I don’t think so. Laughter is human, and Jesus was fully human. Jesus promised that those who mourned would laugh. He mourned; would He not…
Matthew 2 has all the elements of an exodus story. There’s a murderous king, who slaughters Jewish babies. There’s a infant who will be Israel’s future deliverer, saved from the murderous king so He can later return to save His people and lead them to the Promised land. There’s an…
The calendar of Israel was primarily theological, centered on commemorating the salvific acts of God, but also agricultural, celebrating the creation-restoring effects of those salvific acts. The feasts of the first month celebrated the reviving of the world in the Spring, and typified the cutting off of the Savior in…
The chiastic shape corresponds to the shape of human life. This should not surprise us, because we are made in the image of God, and God is manifest in Word and Spirit. If we are living epistles, our lives will look a bit like the literary shape of the books…
Back in January, Venkatesh Rao wrote a fascinating post on the Ribbonfarm blog, discussing different forms of models of narrative. Engaging with Ursula LeGuin’s talk ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ , Rao explores her contrast between the (male) ‘hero narrative’ and the (female) ‘carrier-bag story’, and suggests a third…
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Rosenzweig ( Judaism Despite Christianity: The 1916 Wartime Correspondence Between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig , 157) offers this profound rejoinder to the professorial habit of trying to modify the traditional epochs of history: “It is necessary . . . to accept the traditional periods, and to avoid wanting to…
Rosenzweig ( Judaism Despite Christianity: The 1916 Wartime Correspondence Between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig , 115) says that “Only what belongs to both man and woman belongs to all men, and everything else has only sectional interest.” Rosenstock agrees, and elaborates: “The lawyer is the perfect type of male…
In one of his wartime letters to Franz Rosenzweig (the correspondence published as Judaism Despite Christianity: The 1916 Wartime Correspondence Between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig ), Rosenstock challenges the Rosenzweig’s idea that his love for a particular scholar can be a “merely private affair.” Love above all “can’t remain…
Rebecca Rosen reports at the Atlantic on a century-long error on the front page of the New York Times. The issue number for the February 6, 1898 edition was 14,499; the next day, the issue number was 15,000. Nobody noticed until 1999. At the beginning of 2000, the newspaper announced…
In Desire, Dialectic, and Otherness: An Essay on Origins , recently reprinted by Wipf & Stock, William Desmond concedes that “the modern self has been excessively subjectivized” (45). But he thinks that, for all its faults, Cartesianism focused attention on an inescapable philosophical problem: “The Cartesian view has the merit…
At the end of Isaiah 61, the prophet (or Zion) rejoices because Yahweh “has clothed me with garments of salvation, and has wrapped me in a robe of righteousness.” The clothing is festal, clothing for a wedding, and Zion is both the garlanded bridegroom and the jeweled bride (v. 10).…
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