Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Genesis 3 ends on a decisive, and decisively negative, note. Yahweh “drove the man out” of the garden, and, in addition, “at the east of the garden of Eden He stationed the cherubim, and the flaming sword which turned every direction, to guard the way to the tree of life.”…
When she died in 2005 at the age of 72, Anna Haycraft, the author who published under the name Alice Thomas Ellis, was a celebrated writer in Great Britain. While working at Duckworth Publishers(which her husband owned), she produced a dozen novels, a collection of short stories, a cookbook, volumes…
Some have suggested recently that my "project" is postmodern. To clarify my views on postmodernism, I'm re-posting something I wrote in 2005, with a few modifications. For a fuller discussion, you can check out my Solomon among the Postmoderns (Canon, 2008). First, it is helpful to distinguish, as many writers…
Calling Jerusalem the "holy city" comes so naturally to Christians that it comes as something of a surprise to realize how infrequently the phrase is used in Scripture. Not only is Jerusalem rarely called holy, but in the Old Testament this classification is found only in texts that refer to…
Asking why the church doesn’t sing hymns or even why men don’t sing in church is a bit like lamenting over the lame man who can’t waltz on the dance floor. While it is a valid question, the more immediate question would seem to be, “why doesn’t the lame man…
The theme of 1 Timothy is the distinction between the true children in the Household of God and false children who really belong to the household of Satan. This is seen in the fact that in the chiastic structure of the Epistle, heresy is the subject in the center (…
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T homas Nagel reviews Daniel Dennett's latest, From Bacteria to Bach and Back , in the NYRB . It's a wild ride. Reality, real reality, is the matter-in-process that science describes, Dennett argues. Dennett is famously, insanely consistent in his materialism. Nagel writes, “Bach’s or Picasso’s creative genius, and our…
C harles Rosen celebrated Chopin's birth in June 2010 with a NYRB essay on the composer. Rosen observed that until the twentieth century, Chopin was often treated as a minor figure: “Chopin’s concentration on the genres of salon music considered trivial—nocturnes, mazurkas, waltzes—placed him among the miniaturists. Critics could not…
I n his history of popular culture in early modern Europe, Peter Burke traces what he describes as the “triumph of Lent” during the 17th and 18th centuries. He refers to Brueghel’s painting, Combat of Carnival and Lent and says, “I am tempted to interpret ‘Carnival,’ who belongs to the…
W illiam Henry Green's 1890 Bibliotecha Sacra essay on “ Primeval Chronology ” has been a touchstone of evangelical biblical scholarship for over a century, its arguments regularly cited or alluded to by scholars dealing with the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11. In response to skeptical challenges to the…
I n his recently-published Sign and Sacrifice , Rowan Williams notes the continuity between the post-Maccabean theology of martyrdom and the death of Jesus. For intertestamental Jews, as for Romans, death could be noble and triumphant. There's a radical discontinuity too. For Jews (as for Romans), martyrs triumphed because they…
H elmut Kuhn begins his 1941 article on “true tragedy” by noting the chronological proximity of Plato and Sophocles: “When Sophocles died, Plato had just come of age. So the question naturally arises whether the chronological succession is historically significant. Can we discover a line of development leading from Aeschylus…
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