Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Along His journey to Jerusalem, Jesus stops frequently to have meals, three times with Pharisees (7:37-50; 11:37-54; 14:1-35). Meals were central to Jesus’ ministry. He comes “eating and drinking” (Luke 7:34). While His meals are not just for refreshment, they are opportunities for teaching the protocols of the kingdom. Meals…
Time as a realm of participation can be difficult for us imaginatively to grasp. While music is a profoundly temporal art, exploring the medium of time like no other, most of our temporal experience seems decidedly unmusical in character, disjointed and unorchestrated. The form in which we naturally discover time…
John devotes much attention to Jesus’ burial clothes. He tells us that Nicodemus brought about a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes to spice Jesus body, and that He was bound in linen wrappings. We find out that His body and His head were wrapped separately. (John 19:39-40; 20:6-7). When…
Thinking about time in terms of music also helps us to appreciate its unity and inner relations. Henri Bergson observes our cultural habit of dividing time into discrete moments, and conceiving of these as if akin to objects in a spatial succession. [1] Against such a notion, Bergson argues for…
As we attend to these and other aspects of music’s temporality, Begbie suggests, we will find means by which to resist some of our habitual modern ways of conceptualizing time, most especially our tendency to conceive of time as if it were a homogeneous set of technologically quantifiable units laid…
The Hidden Dimension In many fields of scientific study, the apparent complications and contradictions are dispelled once the internal logic is perceived. Biblical hermeneutics is no different, since the author of Creation is the Author of the Word. The Bible’s literary labyrinth radiates organically from an algorithm so simple it…
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I’ve summarized some of David W. Noble’s analysis of Moby Dick ( The Eternal Adam and the New World Garden ) in the past, but the notes below highlight Noble’s take on the religio-political themes of Melville’s novel. Ishmael, he notes, begins the novel looking for redemption in the sea.…
Tertullian ( Against Marcion , 4.16) offers an interesting explanation of the consistency of Jesus’ teaching with that of the lex talionis : “He who counselled that an injury should be forgotten, was still more likely to counsel the patient endurance of it. But then, when He said. ‘Vengeance is…
Catherine Pickstock, describing view of modern Catholic liturgical reformers, writes, “The mediaeval Latin liturgy seemed to consist in disorienting ambiguous overlappings between the stages of advance toward the altar of God, and a lack of clarity in the identification of the worshipers and the priest. Its repeated rites of purification…
The name “Mass” comes from the final dismissal: Ite, missa est: Go, it is a dismissal. Jungmann explains: “it is puzzling indeed that, as a matter of fact, it has been designated by a separating , a going apart . Such, however, appears to be the case in regard to…
In his recent Worship as a Revelation , Laurence Hemming rightly says that the early church took its liturgical cues from the temple (citing Margaret Barker’s books). But then he adds: Not only because of persecution, but also because “what was so sacred was not to be publicly spoken of…
New Testament metaphors of the church-as-temple are often confusing because they envision a growing building, a building that acts a lot like an organic body: “growing into a holy temple in the Lord” (Ephesians 2:21); “living stones” (1 Peter 2:5). The conflation of organic and architectural imagery has an Old…
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