Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The story of Judges 19 and the subsequent chapters are some of the most shocking and appalling accounts in all of Scripture. The callousness of the old host and the Levite, and the monstrous brutality of the men of Gibeah, leaves us feebly scrabbling for words by which to surmount…
David has become king. He has conquered the capital city of Jerusalem. He has brought the ark of Yahweh into the city and placed it in a tent. He has stationed Levites at the tent to offer sacrifices of praise. An anomaly hits him: He has a cedar-paneled palace, and…
In Part 2 of this series we traced what we have of the development of the epiclesis in the liturgy of the Church. In this third and final part we’ll look at the theological implications of this and how we may apply what we’ve learned. As we saw in Part…
In a 2014 piece published in First Things , I offered a "wish list" for Protestant churches, a checklist for a future catholic Protestantism. The wish list doesn't cover everything. It doesn't mention those things that Protestants, especially Evangelicals, already do, often exceedingly well, things like missions and evangelism and…
In the first part of this series we examined the meaning of “blessing” in Scripture and its parallels in Jewish liturgical tradition, but did not find anything that we could properly call an epiclesis (an invocation of the Holy Spirit). We did find examples of invocation of Jesus to “come”…
When the Aaronic priests were ordained, the blood of the ram of "filling” was placed on the lobe of the right ear, the right thumb, and the right big toe (Lev. 8:22-24). Similarly, the cleansing rite for a leper included smearing the right ear lobe, thumb, and big toe with…
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Destroy this Temple, Mark 13:1-37 THE KING RETURNS Palm Sunday celebrates the king?s coming to His city. On Palm Sunday, Jesus entered Jerusalem, hailed as a king. -He requisitions a donkey, claiming it as Lord: ?The Lord has need of it.?E -The donkey has been tied and needs to be…
Another interesting review in the TLS , of Jessica Wolfe’s Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge), an exploration of the literary uses of machinery and machine imagery in Renaissance literature. According to Wolfe, Renaissance writers saw “the profound applicability of mechanical practices and principles to extra-scientific questions.” In political theory,…
Alastair Fowler has an eviserating review of Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World in the February 4 issue of the TLS . He finds that Greenblatt, despite his new historicist interest in the historical embeddedness of literature, is rather sloppy with historical facts and contexts. Like other reviewers of the…
This is the first of what may turn out to be (but also may not turn out to be) a series of outlines or summaries of David Bentley Hart?s Beauty of the Infinite . My goal in this outline (or, these outlines) is not to critique Hart so much as…
More from Marjorie Garber?s book, this time on Julius Caesar . 1) Though the play is often assigned to high school students, Garber says that the play is ?one of Shakespeare?s most subtle and sophisticated,?Eexploring such issues as ?the nature of kingship, the relationship of the public to the private…
And it was many days. Now the word of Yahweh was to ?Eliyyahu in the third year, saying, ?Walk, cause-yourself-to-be-seen to ?Achav And I will give rain on the face of the earth.?E And walked ?Eliyyahu to cause-himself-to-be-seen to ?Achav Now the famine was strong in Shomron. And called ?Achav…
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