Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I begin with a proposition: The Old Testament is not so much a collection of biographies as a biography. The Old Testament is the biography of Jesus, the Son of God. And as such, the Old Testament is the biography of God. This is what Jesus Himself says about the…
Trinity House Institute joins with the Alliance of the Reformed Churches in Ukraine to co-sponsor a conference in Kyiv, Ukraine, on September 19-20. Peter Leithart, President of Trinity House, will deliver a series of lectures on hermeneutics. He will also deliver several lectures at Ostrog Academy on September 18.
Vera Pavlova (b. 1963) has published over a dozen collections of poems in Russian. She came rather late to poetry. In her youth, she studied music and began writing poetry in her early 20s while she was in the maternity ward after giving birth to her first child. Her first…
Registration is now open for the Advent class at Trinity. James Jordan will lecture on the book of Genesis, the book of beginnings, December 16-20. There will be a kickoff welcome on December 15, and classes will be held at Trinity Presbyterian Church . Registration is open until November 1.
In 1533, Hugh Latimer, already well-known in the city of Bristol, preached a series of sermons attacking “pylgremages, worshyppying of seyntes, wurshypyng off ymages, off purgatory, &c. yn the whyche he dyd vehemently perswade towarde the contrary.” The writer of this account went on to say that “the people ware…
Even if Adam had never sinned, there would have been structures of authority, and authority would have been invested in particular men and women. Authority is not a postlapsarian rescue operation; it’s essential to the good of human life. Unfallen Cain might have wanted to build his new home on…
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James Smith’s conclusions regarding Derrida express more clearly than I’ve been able to do my own sense of Derrida. These are scattered quotations from The Fall of Interpretation , pp. 127-129: “Derrida is honest about not challenging for a moment Rousseau’s and Levi-Strauss’s reading of violence; his own analysis is…
James K. A. Smith has a neat scheme for summarizing different view of interpretation in terms of the categories of creation and fall. For some thinkers, interpretation and the possibility of misinterpretation are results of the Fall; for others, interpretation and misinterpretation is inherent in created life, though there is…
Another benefit of Derrida: Because he puts philosophical issues in mythological and metaphorical terms, he moves philosophy into the field of theology. As I’ve pointed out in a number of posts, Derrida (following Plato) speaks of the relationship between speaker and speech (or sometimes between speech and writing) as a…
JP Vernant points out the connection between writing and democratization: “In the kingdoms of the New East, writing was a privilege and specialty of scribes. Writing enabled the royal administration to control the economic and social life of the State by keeping records of it. Its purpose was to constitute…
Well, here’s an interesting coincidence (pointed to by Derrida, still in “Plato’s Pharmacy”): Derrida is discussing the ritual of the pharmakos , which he is connecting to Plato’s various uses of pharmak - words in discussions of knowledge, language, and other issues. The pharmakos rite was a scapegoat ritual, annually…
What is it that makes Derrida so stimulating and fun to read? At least for his treatment of standard philosophical works (I’m reading “Plato’s Pharmacy” in Disseminations ), I think it’s mainly that he shows that philosophy is not about what undergraduate courses in philosophy teach you it is about.…
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