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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It’s hard to find interesting work on Leviticus 23. It’s easy to find tedious critical dissections of the history of the text. One of the conundrums is in verse 2: First we read about the appointed times of Yahweh. Then at the end of the verse we hear about “my”…
Yahweh’s pesach is to take place on the fourteenth day of the first ( ri’shown ) month (Leviticus 23:5). The timing echoes back to the dawn of time. The waters of the flood dried up on the first of the first month ( ri’shown ). Passover celebrates Israel’s deliverance from…
Israel’s feasts both followed the agricultural calendar and reenacted Israel’s past. Passover, Pentecost and Booths celebrated various phases of planting, growth, and harvest. Israel’s feasts reconciled nature with salvation history. The reconciliation was ritual, calendrical. The dual calendar protected Israel from becoming a nature cult, and from becoming a purely…
“Knowledge is a gift ,” writes Esther Lightcap Meek ( A Little Manual for Knowing , 8). She continues, “Epiphany comes as a surprising encounter equal parts knowing and being known. It could never have been achieved in a systematic or linear fashion. It transforms knower and known. Deep insight…
I offer some reflections on the theology of festivity in the Hebrew Bible, focused on Leviticus 23.
Thomas Mallon offers some qualified praise to Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place in the NYTBR . He thinks it is several cuts above today’s romance novels. He writes, “Metalious’s writing is mostly undemanding, but it’s also, often . . . not bad. Compared with Jacqueline Susann, her 1960s successor, she reads…
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