Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Platitudes are often sayings whose truthfulness is so apparent, so accepted, and so repeated that they are divested of their power and in fact become the object of ridicule. Their failure lies in their fame, and the contempt they invite is bred by their familiarity. To say that children are…
Click here to download the Translation Here we have the seven-fold Voice of Yahweh, bracketed by two sets of four lines about Yahweh. The central seven-fold Voice section uses "Yahweh" ten times, for a total in this psalm of eighteen usages of "Yahweh" (3 x 3 x 2). The psalm,…
As Adam and Eve walked to the Garden of Eden to meet with Yahweh on their first Sabbath they conversed about the origin and age of the earth. Adam: You know, honey, we spent a lot of time yesterday making preparations for this house, and we still have an awful…
Knowing His paths through Moses and David, in the darkness of the prophets we yet walk in His light. It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be lifted…
These days, to be “candid” is to be frank, honest, genuine. But the word didn’t always mean that. It used to be the name for a virtue that we don’t really have a name for anymore. Its obsolete meaning is “kindliness”: a disposition to think well of others, a tendency…
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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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