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…
Showing page 273 of 309
Showing page 33 of 43
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…
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:…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
Showing page 698 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
