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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It's a common complaint that Africans convert to Christianity not for high-minded religious reasons but for self-interested secular reasons. Drawing on the work of C.C. Okorocha on the Igbo, Andrew Walls disputes this way of framing the issue ( The Missionary Movement in Christian History ): “Religion was always in…
According to Charlotte Gordon's NYTBR review, Michael Knox Beran's Murder by Candlelight “asks us to consider our own hearts of darkness, why we’re obsessed with murder stories, why this obsession matters, and what it suggests about us as a culture and a species.” Beran reaches back into the nineteenth century…
The NYT 's obituary for Oliver Sacks mentions that his 2007 Musicophilia was written partly in response to Steven Pinker's claim that music is “auditory cheesecake, an evolutionary accident piggybacking on language.” Sacks “pointed to [music's] ability to reach dementia patients as evidence that music appreciation is hard-wired into the…
In his recent book on Bonhoeffer's Seminary Vision , Paul House notes that Bonhoeffer insists (in Cost of Discipleship ) that we cannot pit Jesus against Paul. One of the key continuities between the two is baptism. Bonhoeffer writes, “Where the Synoptic Gospels speak of Christ calling men and their…
A couple of weeks back, I suggested that part of Trump's appeal lies in the fact that he resists the scapegoating dynamics of contemporary media and politics. He refuses to take blame. That, Girard would have us believe, undoes the whole scapegoat mechanism; by unmasking the system, it energizes those…
The TLS reviewer is supposed to be reviewing Marilynne Robinson's Lila , but along the way gives a lovely description of what makes Robinson's first novel, Housekeeping , an enduring treasure: “Grave without being heavy, Housekeeping remains Robinson's most lyrically beautiful book. The text weaves together gothic tropes, mystic invocations…
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