Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
We lost Crimea. That is very clear. Putin proved he was not lying when he said he would place women and children ahead of his soldiers to storm Ukrainian military bases. Russian soldiers did exactly that with women (some who volunteered and some who were forced). Russia now occupies all…
Sound is an indicator of life and energy. “Sound signals the present use of power, since sound must be in active production to exist at all.” Things don’t have to be alive to make themselves visible, and “a primitive hunter can see, feel, smell, and taste an elephant when the…
In the most famous section of his best-known novel, Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov brings forward his case against God. He opens with a horrific litany of outrages against children. Turkish soldiers make a baby laugh and then shoot a pistol into his face. A little girl is beaten, thrashed, kicked by…
At the heart of Esther Lightcap Meek's splendid Little Manual for Knowing is a concept she picked up from Michael Polanyi, "subsidiary-focal integration." The concept begins from the insight that all our knowing, all our experience, is double. We focus on something, but we are capable of "indwelling" that focal…
Jesus promises the overcomers of Pergamum "hidden manna" and a "white stone." The hidden manna is often linked with the manna stashed away in the ark of the covenant. The white stone has proved more elusive. Exodus tells us that manna was white (Exodus 16:31) and like bdellium (Numbers 11:7),…
Leviticus 23 begins with a reference to “Yahweh’s appointed times” ( mo’ade-YHWH ). Mo’ed is the common term for the feasts of Israel. A few dimensions to this term. First, it means “appointed time” or “designated time.” It is a time set by Yahweh. Yahweh has claimed certain times as…
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Someone asked me recently about my views on church and state. I replied that I advocate a "Christendom model" of church-state relations. Then I proceeded to qualify. When I was done qualifying, I suddenly wondered whether what I call "Christendom" corresponds to what other people understand by the word. It…
Ezra begins where 2 Chronicles ends, with the decree of Cyrus. Some scholars have argued that the repetition indicates that the books were once united. It's said that the doubling is an ancient literary device to knot together two sections of a text. Whether that is the case or not,…
James Simpson briefly reviews the career of the 17th-century iconoclast William Dowsing in his history of iconoclasm, Under the Hammer . What motivated Dowsing, he argues, wasn't an effort to prioritize the word over the image, but a quest for "jurisdictional clarity." With the triumph of Parliament, the complex jurisdictional…
The key question regarding Freud, says Rosenstock-Huessy ( In the Cross of Reality , 266), is "Whom did Freud obey when he began to develop his theory?" The question arises because "in Freud's relational system there is no place for Sigmund Freud's own experience." He shares this distinction of an…
Alexandra Schwartz's New Yorker essay on self-improvement movements ( "Improving Ourselves to Death" ) starts out breezily enough, but it turns grim pretty fast. The "death" in her title isn't metaphorical. She summarizes the experiment of Carl Cederström and André Spicer, who tried to improve one area of their lives…
In a TLS review of Kontantin Barsht's Drawings and Calligraphy of Fyodor Dostoevsky , Robert Bird reminds us that Dostoevsky was a "trained draughtsman" who "thought in images no less than in words: "He wrote frequently about painting, and many of his key terms suggest visual, rather than verbal communication,…
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