Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Abbreviated Introduction to the Series Scripture is absolutely dripping with animal metaphors. Animal traits, characteristics, and appearances are attributed to God, Man, Angels, Nations, Armies. Since animals are the lowest creature in the three-tiered hierarchy, they are useful to metaphorically focus on a single aspect of God (bold like a…
Many years ago, while perusing Janice Anderson’s revised doctoral dissertation, Matthew’s Narrative Web: Over, and Over, and Over again , I was impressed by her attention to literary structures of repetition within and across Matthew’s Gospel. 1 Her research, in part, nudged me closer toward my present conviction that Matthew…
Abbreviated Introduction to the Series Scripture is absolutely dripping with animal metaphors. Animal traits, characteristics, and appearances are attributed to God, Man, Angels, Nations, Armies. Since animals are the lowest creature in the three-tiered hierarchy, they are useful to metaphorically focus on a single aspect of God (bold like a…
“Like a lily among the thorns, so is my love among the maidens… My beloved is mine and I am his; he pastures among the lilies.” Song 2:2, 16 In chapter two of the Song of Solomon, the Beloved compares his Love to a lily among thorns. The language of…
Introduction From the very beginning, angels and animals have played mediating roles between God and Man. Just as the World was made three-tiered (Heaven, Earth, Deep), so the creatures were made (Angels, Men, Animals). Before Christ came to build the permanent bridge across the chasm between God and Man, various…
Matthew 13, the third major discourse of the apostle’s gospel, is comprised almost entirely of parables. While it may seem that all the parables serve the same purpose in fulfilling the prophet Isaiah (Matthew 13:14), the parables found in verses 44–52, at the very least, function outside that purpose. This…
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“How can a man be born again when he is old?  Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb?” Nicodemus’ way of putting the question sounds childish; but it’s a common question.  My life is a mess, and what’s done cannot be undone.  Then along comes Jesus mocking…
Carroll again: He explains that much recent film criticism takes its cues from the effort to maximize aesthetic satisfaction.  This is evident in the respect given to “transgressive” films that overturn “what are called the codes of Hollywood filmmaking”: “Within the context of recent film criticism, it is appropriate to…
Noel Carroll argues that anti-intentionalist structuralist criticism aims to maximize aesthetic enjoyment, at the expense of all other purposes of art and literature.  This, he argues, “has a very ‘consumerist’ ring to it.  In Buberesque lingo, it reduces our relation to the text to an I/it relationship.”  By contrast, Carroll…
In case you got bogged down and missed the plot, Thornton Wilder helpfully summarizes what he describes as Joyce’s “Night Book”: “We overhear and oversee [the hero] in bed above his tavern at the edge of Dublin.  His conscience is trying him for some obscure misdemeanors committed - or perhaps…
In his treatise Contra Gentiles , Athanasius reproduces an argument from the Phaedrus that provides the immortality of the soul.  Anything that has to be moved by something else is mortal and finite; whatever moves of itself is immortal, and immortally mobile.  What is most fully mobile is what is…
Adorno sees disinterestedness as a necessary stage in the development of aesthetic experience, but says that it has to be transcended by a recognition of the “interest inherent in disinterestedness.” Disinterestedness applies only to certain kinds of works, he says.  Try reading Kafka and remaining in disinterested contemplation: Kafka’s novels…
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