Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
"Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation. When his breath departs, he returns to the earth; on that very day his plans perish. Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord his…
When it comes to the interpretation of Shakespeare, Harold Bloom is my favorite enemy. His writing is brilliant, his knowledge of things Shakespearean encyclopedic, and the insights he offers may puzzle, startle, or amaze, but they always educate. How then can he be an enemy? Because his anti-Christian bias is…
Theopolis President Peter Leithart spent the last week of March lecturing on worship and sacraments in England. He delivered four lectures on liturgy in Bolton, a town north of Manchester, arguing that Christian worship must be worship fit for the king and fit for the kingdom that has come in…
When we think about eschatology, we think immediately of Daniel, of Matthew 24-25, of 1 Corinthians 15 and 2 Thessalonians 2, and of course of Revelation. We don’t, I suspect, think about Genesis. Perhaps Genesis 3:15, with its promise of the woman’s seed, would come to mind. So might the…
Alexander Schmemann in his book, Of Water and the Spirit, expounds the question that appears in nearly all the older baptismal liturgies, “Do you renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world and all sinful lusts of the flesh.” This renunciation, according to…
Franklin Graham recently posted the following statement on his Facebook page: “Listen up—Blacks, Whites, Latinos, and everybody else. Most police shootings can be avoided. It comes down to respect for authority and obedience. If a police officer tells you to stop, you stop. If a police officer tells you to…
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William Deresiewicz has an excellent review of a new biography of Joseph Conrad in the June 11 issue of TNR . One thread of the review has to do with Conrad’s phantasmagorical vision of European imperialism and his related concern for the moral dangers of isolation from well-known social habits…
In an effort to maintain his distinction of meaning and significance, interpretation and critical assessment, E. D. Hirsch examines Welleck’s treatment of Marvell’s phrase “vegetable love.” He notes that “Welleck could not even make his point unless he could distinguish between what ‘vegetable’ probably means as used in the text…
Tallis yet again: He argues that confusion of langue and parole : leads to “conflation of the idea of a world as a value or set of values within the system with the meaning of a word used on a particular occasion, that by virtue of which verbal meaning is…
Tallis thinks that one of the basic confusions of post-Saussurean criticism is a confusion of the levels of parole and langue . Signifiers and signifieds are, for Saussure, purely differential; but words are not signifiers or signifieds, but types of signs, which are combinations of the two. Signifier and signified…
Does language take cues from reality? Tallis says Yes; at least, that’s one kind of relation language has to reality. His charming evidence: He notes that it’s more common to add “barking” to “dog” than to add other verbs. If language doesn’t take its cues from reality, “we must surely…
Tallis contests the post-structuralist notion that all distinctions are linguistic, imported to reality by what we say about them. This, he thinks, oversimplifies a more complex situation. For some realities, the “edges” are determined by language, because those realities depend on classifications that we have brought to the real world.…
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