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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Christians today often think that the church needs to be powerful and well-ordered to attract notice. This is nothing less than unbelief. Think of Ruth the Moabitess, who attaches herself to Naomi when Naomi has nothing (Ruth 1:15-18). Naomi went out of Israel full — with husband, two sons, everything…
Moses' blessing of Levi (Deuteronomy 33:8-11) includes a curse against Levi's enemies: “Yahweh, bless his substance, and accept the work of his hands; shatter the loins of those who rise up against him, and those who hate him, so that they may not rise” (v. 11). Levi's substance consists of…
The description of the angels on Jacob's ladder has long been a puzzle: They are “ascending and descending” (Genesis 28). Since angels come from heaven to earth, shouldn't it be the opposite? Shouldn't they come down before they go up? Yitzhak Pegel suggests a solution in his Going Up and…
Tomoko Masuzawa was startled to discover that one of the “precepts” of modern religious studies was “Thou shalt not quest for the origin of religion” ( In Search of Dreamtime , 2). This was odd on a couple of fronts. For starters, “every one of the ‘founding fathers' of our…
In her 1959 study of Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes , Lily Campbell treats the four main tragedies of tragedies of passion. Shakespeare places characters of different humor in similar circumstances, and depicts how the characters react. Hamlet is a tragedy of grief, Othello of jealousy, Lear of old-age wrath, Macbeth of…
Mark Chaves observes ( Congregations in America ) that it is difficult to say what congregations do, and that for two reasons. On the one hand, a congregation's “ministry” may actually be the work of a tiny minority of a congregation., On the other hand, congregations in the US are…
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