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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Four angels at the four corners of the land hold back the winds that destroy (Revelation 7:1-3). Altars have corners, and at each corner is a “horn” that “stands” at attention. In the purification offering, blood is smeared on the four horns of the altar, turning the altar into a…
In a National Geographic interview , Marcus Rediker explains how ships provided the setting for developing some of the distinctive institutions and ideas of the modern world: “Large northern European seagoing vessels, which emerge in the 16th and 17th centuries, become by the 18th century the most important technology in…
Shakespeare’s Richard III is a black-hearted hunchbacked murderer. But there has been another legend of Richard III, as a gallant ruler, the victim of Tudor propaganda. Over the past century, the white legend has often prevailed over the black. Desmond Seward’s Richard III is mostly black, and that’s because he…
When John ascends to heaven, he sees four ( tessares ) living creatures, and in the scene in heaven they are mentioned five times (4:6, 8; 5:6, 8, 14). Then the Lamb begins to open the seals, and the four living creatures cry out. The sixth seal reveals four angels…
This is an addendum to my reflections on wings a few weeks ago. Israel is sometimes conceived as a four-cornered land (Ezekiel 7:2), modeled after the four-cornered altar (Exodus 27:2; 38:2) or a four-cornered house (Job 1:19). Israelites are priests; their land is an altar where they make their daily,…
Several factors need to be put back into the standard account of the Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries, says Robert Hoyland in his forthcoming In God’s Path . The first is process. Speed plays such a large role in the standard accounts that we miss the variability,…
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