Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
After Elijah’s battered and depressed howling in the wilderness it must have seemed like the new prophet came eating and drinking. Which is a pattern we see again in the New Testament—John is explicitly identified with Elijah (Luke 1.17, Matthew 11.14), howling the truth in the wilderness that the people…
Reading Robert Conquest’s biography of Stalin 1 has opened new lines of meditation on Paul’s command in Colossians 3:9. But before turning to that, let me briefly indicate what Paul is not saying. He is not saying that there is no such thing as righteous deception, such as Jael practiced…
You won’t find wild lions today in Israel. But lions used to range much more widely than they do now, and in biblical times they were a menace that shepherds in Israel had to contend with. David did as a shepherd boy, and Amos—who “ was among the sheepbreeders of…
I would like to remedy a flaw for English speakers in the book of Genesis. A flaw that may seem innocuous, but we must remember where the devil lives...in the details. If we are to fear the Lord, it behooves our translation committees to ensure that the fearfulness of God…
While reading at my son’s baseball game this week, a mom from our school approached me and asked if I was reading Dante. I wasn’t, but our sons are both reading Divine Comedy in their sophomore literature class, so it was a reasonable question. What unfolded was a quick conversation…
In the first two essays in this series, I addressed the question of how the nations would learn about Israel’s Torah, in the second essay especially emphasizing the aesthetic aspects of Israel’s testimony. For we naturally wonder: How would people in Mesopotamia or Egypt, not to mention the rest of…
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Despite the evidence of the past half-decade (longer, actually), many Muslims still insist on portraying Islam as fundamentally peaceful, tolerant of non-Muslims, and claim the holy-war interpretation of jihad as an aberration of a few fanatics. Perhaps not surprisingly, these apologists are found not only in Arab and Iranian mosques…
One way to characterize the modern innovation in biblical interpretation is that it changes the Bible from a history of salvation into a history of documents. The Bible does not give access to history or the acts of God; it only gives us access to itself - the Bible as…
The new edition of the Oxford Companion to English Literature , edited by novelist Margaret Drabble, is a superb, entirely updated reference work. The range is astonishing: As one would expect, it includes biographical entries for British poets and novelists from the earliest times to yesterday, but also reviews the…
Gadamer traces the development of the notion of symbol and the corresponding, and contemporaneous, devaluation of allegory. Allegory came to be identified with “non-art” as experiential-expressive notions of art and poetry developed in post-Kantian romanticism. Along the way, he notes the importance that allegory played in the formation of Western…
In the same 1962 interview, Rosenstock-Huessy has some shrewd advice about the corrupting power of grant money on youn scholars. “If I have to solicit great foundations for money for my research,” he says, “then I have to propose something which is already obsolete for me. I know no researcher…
Rosenstock-Huessay notes that the differences between European and American elementary education have much to do with the fact that “The teaching function in America, until recent years [this from a 1962 interview], had been women’s work. All teaching up to higher education, therefore, had a completely different appearance than in…
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