Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In the Bible, fatness is such a blessing, that it is especially hard to understand why wicked men are permitted to enjoy such a state. It requires a theodicy and faith in God. Thus: “For they have no pangs until death; their bodies are fat and sleek . They are…
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The allusion to the Exodus story is contained in the first words of Deuteronomy 14:1 — “ye are the sons of Yahweh your God” — as well as in 14:2 in the use of the technical term translated “treasured possession,” “His own possession,” “peculiar people,” “precious people,” and so forth.…
I have argued that Deuteronomy 14:1-21 is an independent literary unit that applies the Third Word to the lives of Israelites from the time of Moses and Joshua. In this short pericope, Moses suggests broad and deep meaning by means of literary allusion to the stories of the creation and…
In his recently republished The New Creation , the late, delightful Herbert McCabe defends the priesthood of the plebs as roundly as anyone could want. Citing Hebrews, he claims that "there is an essential difference between the Christian community and the community of the Old Law, or any other religious…
Augustine famously prayed, “Our hearts our restless until they rest in You.” True indeed. Being creatures, we inherently sense our ontological poverty—our innate condition of dependence—and are compelled to find a sense of security. And it is also true—as Augustine’s own narrative painfully illustrates—that one of the things we most…
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One of the most amusing contributions to the early modern debate on the origins of language came from Francis Mercury van Helmont. Like many others, he insisted that Noah spoke Hebrew, but his way of defending and explication that was uniquely his own. In his 1667 Very Short delination of…
You wouldn’t know as you slogged through his impenetrable prose, but Husserl’s turn to phenomenology was, Jonathan Ree argues, a “belated return to plain healthy common sense” ( I See A Voice , 343). All knowledge comes initially through the senses, the scholastics had said, and early modern philosophers had…
Last week at Slate , Mike Pesca assured us that, Montgomery Burns notwithstanding, steeplers aren’t necessarily evil. Steepling is what you do when you form a tent with your fingers. Touching fingers in succession while steepling is optional. Pesca cites the Definitive Book of Body Language by Barbara and Allan…
Historically, “aesthetics” has had an accidental relationship to art. Aesthetics, from aesthesis , referred to perception through senses. In this sense, an “aesthetic” theory of art is a theory with a particular focus on the sensory experience of art. If we put aside the peculiar theory of the senses embodied…
John is so subtle that we nearly miss it. Jesus says, “While I am in the world, I am the light of the world” (John 9:4), implying that at some time he might not be in the world. Then he heals a blind man with clay and tells him to…
Belief in God is natural, argues Justin Barrett in Born Believers . His is not a theological or philosophical argument about natural knowledge, but a conclusion from interviews, surveys, and other psycho-sociological evidence. Which makes atheism rather an anomaly, Barrett things, and a comparatively rare one. After surveying the factors…
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