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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Cheating is pervasive, but rarely receives extended ethical analysis, argues Deborah Rhode in her forthcoming Cheating . We cheat on taxes, in games and sports, in love, in finding shortcuts to get what we want. She argues for a stringent set of criteria for breaking conventions and rules: "individuals’ natural…
Poet and novelist Ben Lerner struggles to explain the experience of reading the poems of John Ashbery, who died this week. The experience, mind you, not the poems themselves, which tend to defy explanation. Lerner quotes his first novel, where a character is describing reading Ashbery: "The best Ashbery poems…
Josiah presides over the greatest Passover in the history of the monarchy (2 Chronicles 35:18). No sooner has the celebration subsided than Josiah heads out of Jerusalem to confront Pharaoh Neco as the latter marches north to fight Assyria. Josiah makes a military and political blunder here. But it's worse…
Neel Mukherjee reviews recent books on India, including Adam Roberts's Superfast . Roberts, he says, offers a serious book that exposes the appalling problems that India faces. Not least is the current government's penchant for authoritarian manipulations: "Modi, however, has a firm understanding of fake news and image manipulation. From…
The title novella in Patrick Modiano's collection, Suspended Sentences , is a masterpiece of disquieting understatement. The adult narrator, Patrick, tells of the period of his childhood spent (as "Patoche") with an odd assortment of caretakers - Little Helene, who walked with a slight limp from a circus accident; Annie…
In his Life of Bertrand Russell , Ronald Clark describes the austere Evangelical regimen of the philosopher's childhood: "Lady Russell's evangelical concern to press her younger grandson into a mould of her own choice stamped him physically, intellectually and emotionally with marks that lasted all his life. A puritan despising…
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