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Advent

Advent and Christmas Music Recommendations

Inspired by our recent podcast on Christmas and Advent music recommendations, we offer here a list of excellent recordings that are sure to enrich your Advent and Christmas season. Praetorius: Mass for Christmas Morning Paul McCreesh with the Gabrieli Consort and Players Amazon | Spotify | Apple Music 2. Christmas…

by John Ahern and Paul BuckleyDecember 23, 2020
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Advent

Between the Altar and the City: Isaiah 65:17-25

In the year 1483 in the city of Nuremberg, the leaders of the renowned Saint Lawrence Church were seeking to redesign their altar, and above the table where the priests presided over the eucharist, they wanted new art installed above the prestigious Krell altar. What they decided on took everyone…

by Casey BedellDecember 22, 2020
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Advent

Why We're the Real Seventh Day Adventists

The consequences of disobedience start with exile from the garden of God and the Tree of Yahweh, but they do not end there. They cascade down through the structure of the dynastic order. Everything which had previously been given in the Kingdom of Elohim is either taken back or curtailed…

by Jerry BowyerDecember 18, 2020
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Biblical Studies

Psalm 23: A Lesson in Reading Biblical Poetry

Parallelism: A Course Correction If you have ever studied Hebrew poetry, you have probably heard its basic poetic feature described as “parallelism.” Hebrew poetry is not metered, it does not rhyme, it does not employ many of the common poetical tropes, but its distinctive (and almost universal) feature is commonly…

by Ryan HandermannDecember 15, 2020
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Deuteronomy

Deuteronomy 17 and the Separation of Powers

In The Crown and the Courts , David C. Flatto traces the development of the idea of judicial independence in Jewish commentaries on the Scriptures – particularly Deuteronomy 17 – from the Second Temple and early rabbinic periods. These periods roughly span 400 BC to 300 AD. Flatto does not…

by James R. RogersDecember 11, 2020
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Advent

Zechariah and John: A Story in Names

A curious feature of the Infancy Narratives in the Gospel of Luke is the naming of John the Baptist. When the angel appears to Zechariah, he is instructed to give his promised son the name John (Luke 1:13). On the day of John’s circumcision, Luke tells us that “they [presumably…

by Rhys LavertyDecember 8, 2020

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Republic of Imagination

As she has traveled in the US to promote Reading Lolita in Tehran , Azar Nafisi has heard a lot about the dismal state of reading in America. She wasn’t convinced, and begins her new book, The Republic of Imagination , with a defense of the American reader: “The majority…

November 11, 2014

Crisis of Man

Mark Greif’s The Age of the Crisis of Man exhumes a neglected thread of American intellectual history, a period from the early 30s to the early 70s when the “crisis of man” was on everyone’s mind. Though an intellectual history, Greif attends as much to novelists as to philosophers, arguing…

November 11, 2014

The Constitution of the “Cultic”

God set Jesus forth as a “ hilasterion in His blood” in order to achieve redemption (Romans 3:25). Theodore Jennings ( Outlaw Justice , 66), insistent on reading Paul politically, can’t quite make sense of this: “The text connects loyalty to blood. And this is exactly what a reader of…

November 11, 2014

Living the Gift

“Gifts,” writes John Barclay ( Galatians and Christian Theology , 307), “typically express and reinforce a preexistent system of values.” Gifts are given to the deserving, and signify their merit. According to Paul, God’s gift of Christ is given to the un deserving, and that “dangerous and unsettling” gift (308)…

November 10, 2014

Prophetic Eucharist

A strong angel hands John a book, not to read but to eat (Revelation 10). The instructions and John’s compliance (vv. 9b-11) are chiastically structured: a. He said, Take and eat. b. It will make your stomach bitter c. but in your mouth it will be sweet as honey. a’/d.…

November 10, 2014

Prophetic Recommissioning

John is commissioned to write to the seven churches of Asia (Revelation 1). He’s commissioned again as a prophet to prophesy (chapter 10).The reason is that his portfolio expands. He initially writes to the churches, and his visions have to do with the “land.” His second commission is to be…

November 10, 2014

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