Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In a brief article entitled, “The Theology of Old Testament Sacrifice," Gordon Wenham, expanding on a comment about ritual from anthropologist Monica Wilson, states: We resort to ritual when we want to express our deepest feelings. Consider the rituals used in greeting people in our society: a nod, a handshake,…
Everyone here in Cambridge is talking about sacrifice. My supervisor, Dr. John Milbank, is working on a book on gift in which he is dealing with recent literature on sacrifice. The graduate seminar in Systematics during Michaelmas Term focused on the theme of sacrifice. The first presenter was Dr. Ian…
Protestant-Catholic debates about the sacraments have usually taken the form of debates about sacramental efficacy. Protestants claim that Catholics believe that sacraments work ex opere operato , virtually a magical view of the sacraments. A priest goes through the motions and says the hocus-pocus and "presto!" the sacraments confer grace.…
When Israel came out of Egypt, she was a collection of tribes descended from the Tribe of Abraham. Tribalism drops out of history into the "world" by looking back to ancestors and by orienting to the spirits that govern the world. The world must not be manipulated, because to do…
Angels are the mediators of the Old Creation, as Eugenio Corsini has rightly pointed out in his commentary, The Apocalypse. For this reason, argues Corsini, the book of Revelation must have to do with the final end of the Old Creation order, which he associates with the work of Jesus…
Our procedure in "Through New Eyes Volume 2" thus far has been to lay out the general overview of history and its meaning as the Bible presents it. My hope is to fill this out in four major sections, corresponding to the four ages and the four testaments in the…
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Late at night in Lady Olivia’s great house in Illyrium, three friends – Sir Toby, the lady’s uncle, Feste her fool, and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, her hapless suitor – sing drunken songs that resound loudly through the empty halls. Malvolio, Lady Olivia’s stern steward and “something of a Puritan,” rises…
David Harvey ( Ways of the World ) describes our cultural moment in terms of “space-time compression,” and finds an analogy with the speed-up of life that was widely noted at the beginning of the twentieth century: “While historical analogies are always dangerous, I think it no accident that postmodern…
In her collection of essays on money, Slave of Two Masters , Melinda Selmys devotes several pages to the celebration of motherhood and its unique economics. Taking her cue from the curse of Genesis 3, she argues that men have always “lorded” over women by claiming all important human achievements…
The cry has come up from our national journalogians at the NYT and the Daily News : “God isn't fixing this. No more prayers. Let's get some action.” If God - the living God - were to get busy fixing things, they may not like the way He goes about…
As Robert Jenson has argued, the big question of religion is the question of eternity: How is God related to time? For Greco-Roman paganism and for the great religions of the far east, god or the gods are immune to time, alien to time. The whole point of Plato's forms…
Despite the distracting use of the opposition of of “authenticity” and “responsibility,” Terry Eagleton has some thoughtful observations on the tragic dilemma in Hamlet ( Shakespeare and Society , 1967). Hamlet’s is a society of “reciprocal human definitions,” that is to say, a man’s identity is mirrored to him by…
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