Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The drink offering or libation ( nesek ) is mentioned in only three places in the book of Leviticus. When the sheaf of the firstfruits was waved before the Lord, a grain offering was to be burned, along with "its libation, a fourth of a hin of wine [approx. one…
When I became a Calvinist it wasn't long before I learned that John Owen’s The Death of Death in the Death of Christ was regarded as the masterful treatise on what is known as "Limited Atonement"--the "L" in the TULIP mnemonic device for "the five points of Calvinism." This wasn't…
One of the advantages of paying very close attention to the details in the Bible, especially chronological and genealogical details, is that they can shed light on situations that don’t seem to make much sense apart from them. One such situation is that of Bathsheba. It appears that Bathsheba willingly…
The Feast of Ingathering in the seventh month of the Sinaitic calendar is also called the Feast of Sukkoth, of Booths, also called Feast of Tabernacles. I have usually called it by that last phrase, and it is the most common today; but there is a problem: A tabernacle is…
When Matthew’s Gospel was first read aloud to the fledgling Christian congregations, the experience must have been like seeing the words “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” appear afresh on cinema screens in 1999. Yet, unlike The Phantom Menace, the New Testament did not disappoint. Why?…
Fragmentation and integration are phenomena which artist Makoto Fujimura feels bodily, and about which he is concerned profoundly. What do these mean for him? How may we draw his insights into this ongoing consideration—itself integrative—of integration in a fragmented world? Thus far I have been acquainting you with matters already…
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Featherstone claims that economics has generally focused on the production rather than the consumption side of things, perhaps because of “the assumption that consumption was unproblematic because it was based upon the concept of rational individuals buying goods to maximize their satisfaction.” Only in the late 19th century was attention…
Cultural elites have, Featherstone suggests, an inherently ambivalent relationship with the market. His argument, if I understand it, goes something like this: Cultural elites want to preserve a monopolization of cultural products. Hence, for instance, peer review of scholarly work; work that hasn’t passed peer review can be dismissed as…
McDonald’s provides a helpful glimpse at the complexities surrounding postmodernity. On the one hand, the global reach of McDonald’s seems a perfect illustration of one part of the postmodern situation - the global diffusion of American culture and tastes, the plasticity and airiness of postmodern culture, the breaching of national…
McDonald’s provides a helpful glimpse at the complexities surrounding postmodernity. On the one hand, the global reach of McDonald’s seems a perfect illustration of one part of the postmodern situation - the global diffusion of American culture and tastes, the plasticity and airiness of postmodern culture, the breaching of national…
Though often conceived as a crisis within Western civilization, postmodernism, Featherstone argues, is partly impelled by globalization. Globalization, he begins, usually conveys two images - the spread of a single, increasingly uniform culture throughout the world, and the “compression” or layering and juxtaposition of various cultures within a particular location…
Culture, Mike Featherstone suggests in Undoing Culture , becomes problematic in consumer societies. How? As developed in cultural anthropology, culture is “somehow homologous to the distinctions, differences, and divisions between social groups who unconsciously use culture as relatively fixed markers in status games.” But in consumer societies, there is little…
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