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The Lady and Her Jewels: An Epiphany Meditation

And a great portent appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars; she was with child and she cried out in her pangs of birth, in anguish for delivery (Revelation 12:1-2). Then Joshua spoke…

by Richard BledsoeJanuary 6, 2015
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Anointing

Fattening Our Suffering

In his post asking Ought we Anoint the Dying? Peter Leithart makes an excellent and important point about our suffering as members of Christ. However, he only parenthetically mentions that the verb in question in James 5 is not chrio but aleipho . By assuming that these words are interchangeable,…

by Robert MaddoxDecember 30, 2014
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James

Death as Frenemy

We spend a lot of time in the church talking about what it means to live like a Christian. But what does it mean to die like a Christian? If we are to follow Christ in life, what does it mean for us to follow him in death as well?…

by Rich LuskDecember 23, 2014
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Literature

Was Shakespeare A Christian?

How would one go about answering the question posed by my title? That depends on what the question means. Obviously, different definitions of the question would require different approaches to an answer. Right off hand, I can think of at least three possible — though not necessarily mutually exclusive —…

by Ralph Allan SmithDecember 23, 2014
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American Culture

Phobophobia

In recent weeks and months, we have seen events that are not the event. The drama around these events is not the events themselves, but the anxiety about the events, and then even the anxiety about the anxiety about the events. That is the real event. The events in Ferguson,…

by Richard BledsoeDecember 22, 2014
anointing-david
Anointing

Ought We Anoint the Dying?

Anointing the sick, including the dying, is one of the traditional seven sacraments of the Catholic Church. The Reformers denied that the rite qualified as a sacrament. Formally, this was because anointing did not have a direct authorization from Jesus; more theologically, it was not one of the marks that…

by Peter LeithartDecember 18, 2014

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Hispanic America

In his recent Our American: A Hispanic History of the United States , Felipe Fernández-Armesto attempts to re-orient the history of the US. As the Economist reviewer explains, “The book takes aim at the founding myths of America that run exclusively from east to west. Those myths begin with ocean-crossings…

January 25, 2014
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Newton’s Chronology

Scott Mandelbrote reviews Jed Z. Buchwald and Mordechai Feingold’s Newton and the Origin of Civilization in the TLS , a study of Newton’s efforts to reconstruct the history of the ancient world and his use of historical astronomy to buttress his biblical chronology. Mandelbrote summarizes the background of Newton’s project:…

January 25, 2014
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Crime and what?

Oliver Ready offers an insightful analysis of Crime and Punishment in the latest TLS . As Ready says, the book’s title creates expectations about its contents: “A ready-made title, Crime and Punishment suggests a ready-made plot. A man will commit a crime. He will be caught. He will be punished.…

January 25, 2014
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Permadeath

A new zombie apocalypse game, DayZ , departs from conventional gaming by introducing permadeath, which is a lot like real death in that it is permanent: Evie Nagy reports , permadeath means “that players have only one life in the game and lose everything if they are killed—as well as…

January 25, 2014
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All Souls

Rosaenstock-Huessy argues that the feast of All Souls is the source of Western liberty: “Liberty was promised to all souls, liberty, the great promise of Revolution, is first heard in the Occident at All Souls” ( Out of Revolution , 510). The feast accomplishes this by inserting death and the…

January 24, 2014
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Balthasar’s Triune Event

Balthasar, writes Gerald O’Hanlon ( The Immutability of God in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar ), thought it necessary to re-examine the tradition regarding immutability and impassibility because both needed to be “understood in the context of the liveliness of inner-trinitarian love” (168). He elaborates, “Within an analogical…

January 24, 2014

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