Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The resurrection stories in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are among the strangest stories in all of the literature of the world, even among the strangest stories in the Bible. That is true of each Gospel’s accounts individually, but even more of the collection as a whole. On the one…
As a pastor, I’m interested in discipleship. Christians are called to be disciples of our Lord Jesus Christ. Discipleship has everything to do with the disciplines we walk by in our lives. Things like Bible reading, prayer, and fasting are hallmarks of standard Christian discipleship. The basic thrust is that…
Psalm 1 is justly famous among biblical texts. It opens the Psalter, it’s a paean to the life-giving power of the Law, and it beautifully describes righteous life as a stable, fruitful tree. It subtly weaves the contrasting threads of wickedness and righteousness into a succinct summary of biblical wisdom:…
No book is more quoted in Hebrews than the Psalter: there are quotations and allusions to psalms on virtually every page. And many of the quotations are not passing references but closely considered and repeatedly cited as the author of Hebrews develops his central arguments. Much of Hebrews is exposition…
Howard Bloom is a beautiful hypocrite. The author of books in as different subjects as Mohammed, scientific theory, and the cultural upheaval of the 1960s, he professes to be a “stone cold atheist.” Yet in spite of that profession, Bloom obviously writes as a Jew; that is, he writes with…
There may be some debate about who deserves the title “the King of American literature,” but, at least to my mind, there should be no debate over who deserves to be “the Queen” – let’s give the crown to Flannery O’Connor. She is, however, a very unlikely queen. Unlikely, not…
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This scene, like the scene that opens Act 3, shows Hamlet encountering a woman who in his mind has betrayed him. Again, he has been sent for, and probably suspects that it is another setup like the one with Ophelia. He has just come from the play, ready to drink…
FO Matthiessen described Melville’s Pierre as “an American Hamlet,” a novel that attempts to “translate” Shakespeare into 19th-century American life. In part, this is a matter of Melville matching characters and plots: “Lucy’s pale innocence fails Pierre as Ophelia’s did Hamlet; the well-named Reverend Mr. Falsgrave’s cushioned voice of worldly…
Derrida, famously, challenges what he calls the metaphysics of presence. What is challenging is not the reality of presence as such, but the notion that we can arrive at some pure presence of a thing, a moment, a self that is unmixed with anything other than itself. A pure instant…
Culler offers an example from Nietzsche that provides an excellent example of the ju-jitsu of deconstruction. Nietzsche argues that causality is not something given, but is the product of a rhetorical operation, a chronological reversal ( chronologische Umdrehung ). I feel a pain, and go searching for a cause of…
At the beginning of his book on Deconstruction , Jonathan Culler notes that critical theory, seen “as an attempt to establish the validity or invalidity of particular interpretive procedures,” is profoundly indebted to New Criticism: This movement “not only instilled the assumption that the purpose of literary study is the…
All page numbers are from the Heany translation. The central focus of the first two fights is Heorot, the mead-hall of Hrothgar. The mead-hall is the focus of a complex of imagery. (The last fight has a similar origin, as Beowulf’s hall is destroyed by the dragon. The house is…
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