Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
There is nothing good Satan cannot pervert, and that fact extends to the Christian public witness against abortion just as it applies to everything else. As a Christian who has written, marched, and picketed against legalized abortion since 1970, I have been saddened to see the development of the anti-Christ…
(We are discussing the meaning of the phrase "cutting off of days" in Genesis 4:3, showing that it implies the turn of the year in autumn.) Two passages use the term "cutting off of years" to refer to the lunar year, beginning in the Spring. Exodus 12:41 – at the…
In the second year of Darius, near the end of the feast of booths, the prophet Haggai encouraged the Jews of the restoration to continue their work on the temple by assuring them that “the latter glory of this house will be greater than then former” (Hag. 2:9). To this…
G. K. Chesterton began Orthodoxy by describing the plot of a book that he had never written. Taking a page from Chesterton, below I will briefly map out the territory of a book (or books) that need(s) to be written. Had I but world enough and time–and a small army…
As long as Moses lived, Israel seldom worshipped other gods directly. She broke the First Word by breaking the Second, worshipping God through the calf. As we shall see, God always treats such Liturgical Idolatry as Covenantal Idolatry, but it is far more serious because it is committed by those…
In response to my article, " The Holy City " (in Biblical Horizons 55) James B. Jordan has made several suggestions about how I might expand on the ideas presented there. Several other readers have also contributed their insights. Below, I trace a few sketchy lines of thought. 1. The…
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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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