Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Every advent of new media creates the justifiable reaction from some that the necessarily accompanied amputation may not be worth the extension made possible by the new tools. This is not unique to the Digital Age. Lamoignon Malesherbes, the French politician who was counsel for the defense of Louis XVI,…
A response to Gage Crowder's " The Hole in our Hope ?" Already, the first pages of the Bible promise a bright future. The story starts with the creation of heaven and earth, where heaven is perfect, but the earth is in a state of formless emptiness. Yet, God takes…
A rejoinder to Bubu Jarmulak's essay, " Embrace Pessimism ." Whereas calumnious critiques are reflections of more on the critic than the work criticized, good critiques are always opportunities for reassessment and improvement if they are received as such . Since its renaissance, the biblical doctrine of postmillennialism—or “optimistic eschatology,”…
Several decades ago, a pastor (and friend) mentioned in passing at one of our regular breakfasts together that he wasn’t satisfied with the usual reading of Jesus’s prayer in Gethsemane, the usual reading being that Jesus asked the Father to avoid the Cross at Gethsemane. We turned to the passage,…
On May 21, 1604, the cathedral of Toledo in Spain held job interviews for the post of choirmaster, the head of music at the church. The position had been vacated when the previous occupant, Alonso Lobo, was poached by the nearby cathedral of Seville, and Toledo needed a replacement who…
Imagine — counterfactually: on the night he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus held up an empty hand and said, ‘This is the blood of the covenant poured out for you. Drink of it.’ But there was no cup, no wine, nothing. If there’s no sign of the covenant, is there…
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Ibsen, Steiner argues, did not write tragedies. Ibsen wrote “dramatic rhetoric” calling society to reform. For real tragedy, there is no such “solution” to be found, there is no remedy, except destructive sacrifice and perhaps a deus ex machina. From this angle, tragedy is perhaps among the STOICHEIA that prepared…
Some more quotations from Steiner’s Death of Tragedy : “We cannot understand the romantic movement if we do not perceive at the heart of it the impulse toward drama . . . . The romantic mode is neither an ordering nor a criticism of life; it is a dramatization. And…
Some thoughts on NT Wright’s Rutherford House Lecture, August 2003. I have little disagreement with much of the lecture, and it clarified a number of things for me. Wright’s views on justification, however, continue to puzzle me at a number of points. Here’s an attempt to clarify my (or NTW’s)…
Some thoughts on NT Wright’s Rutherford House Lecture, August 2003. I have little disagreement with much of the lecture, and it clarified a number of things for me. Wright’s views on justification, however, continue to puzzle me at a number of points. Here’s an attempt to clarify my (or NTW’s)…
Steiner notes that, following the Renaissance, European drama operated under the shadows of neo-classical and Elizabethan dramatic practice, the former “closed” and rigidly adhering to Aristotelian criteria, the other open and experimental. He discusses the theory of Thomas Rymer (a neo-classicist) at some length, concluding that the controversies that Rymer…
George Steiner in his Death of Tragedy describes the “Shakespearean difference” as mainly due to Shakespeare’s avoidance of fascination with Hellenic models: “The neo-classic view [which rigidified Aristotelian conceptions of tragedy] expresses a growing perception of the miracle of Greek drama. This perception was fragmentary. There were few translations of…
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