Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In the 48th year, the third month, and the fourteenth night, while I slept in my bed, I was taken in vision to Xanadu and set upon a high hill. Looking to the west, I saw a large building, surrounded with gardens and fountains, walks and gravestones, and a bell…
‘Tis the season to be informed–sometimes in gentleness, often with vigor–by a variety of Christians (and others) 1 claiming that it is wrong to celebrate Christmas. I have no desire to force anyone to celebrate Christmas against their will. Indeed, it would be insulting to the high holiday to pretend…
Part 2: The Enoch Factor Back in Open Book 21 we discussed "The Enoch Factor." Because that was several years ago (May 1994) and many people have begun reading this letter since that time, we shall return to the subject here and expand what we wrote at that time. After…
Day 6. The sixth day provides the creation of land animals and of humanity. As we saw above, the second day spills over to the first half of the third day, for only at that point did God say that it was good. Similarly, it seems that the fifth day…
During the past two decades, the "quest of the historical Jesus" has entered a new phase. The first incarnation of the quest was rudely shaken by the publication of Albert Schweitzer’s classic Quest of the Historical Jesus , easily the most devastating and funniest work of New Testament scholarship ever…
At the 1997 Biblical Horizons Summer Conference, the Rev. Jeffrey Meyers presented a series of remarkable lectures on the gospel of Mark. Among his many insightful comments, he suggested that the second gospel continues where the first gospel ends; Matthew ends with Jesus saying "Go" (Matthew 28:19), and Mark’s shows…
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Durkheim, on John Milbank's reading ( Theology and Social Theory , 63-4), attempted to socialize Kant. Comte had already argued that Kant anticipated relativism, since he knew that knowledge had to do with “one's environmental setting” and that “this principle made transcendent metaphysics impossible.” Biology and sociology were to make…
In his Bloodtaking and Peacemaking (180-1), his study of Icelandic society, William Ian Miller distinguishes between feuds and “other types of violence like war, duels, or simple revenge killings that involve no one beyond the killer and his victim.” While he recognizes the difficulties of definition, he lays out seven…
Lamech's song in Genesis 4 is today read as a taunt and a warning. “I have killed a man for wounding me,” he tells his wives, and a boy for striking me. If Cain is avenged sevenfold, then Lamech seventy sevenfold” (Genesis 4:23-24). But there is another reading, one involving…
R. Chris Hassel has compiled a dictionary of every religion-related work he could find in Shakespeare's plays and poems. The entries in Shakespeare's Religious Language are usually divided into three parts - a definition, a compilation of Shakespeare's uses of the term, and references to contemporary or near-contemporary writers (Donne…
Ted Grimsrud's Instead of Atonement attempts to tells the “Bible's salvation story” without appeal to the “logic of retribution.” Sacrifice, he says, was not about retribution but about the worshipers grateful response to God's saving acts; it doesn't change God's attitude toward us, and neither does the death of Jesus.…
In The Anti-social Family , recently republished by Verso, Michele Barrett and Mary McIntosh lament that, for all the hubbub about changing gender roles, not all that much has changed: “A gross asymmetry in heterosexual relations remains, despite these improvements. Men still seek and are willing to pay for the…
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