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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Early in his Tragic Sense of Life , Unamuno captures the profound connection between autonomy and tragic character in a passage of hyperventilating passion: “The visible universe, the universe that is created by the instinct of self-preservation, becomes all to narrow for me. It is like a cramped cell, against…
There’s something chiastic going on in 3:19-31 (or maybe 2:25-3:30). A. by works of law no flesh shall be justified, 19-20 B. Apart from law, righteousness of God is revealed, 21 C. righteousness through faith in Jesus—> for all have sinned, 22-23 D. being justified as a gift through Jesus…
A touch of Spenserian humor: Spenser has a witch create a false Florimell (Book 3) for her slothful and unattractive son, who is smitten with the beauty of the real Florimell. The witch uses materials from Petrarchan love sonnets to construct the lady ?Eactual lamps for eyes, actual golden wire…
Spenser might provide a Milbankian response to Milbank’s endorsement of homosexual sex and “threesomes.” In Book 3 of The Faerie Queene , Spenser’s heroine is Britomart, the lady knight who represents a militant chastity directed toward marital and sexual consummation rather than a fearful virginity that simply avoids sex. Britomart…
William Allan Oram in a book on Spenser writes that “one of the fruitful false etymologies of the Renaissance was the derivation of HERO from EROS: by this understanding, love does not hinder noble deeds but spurs them on.”
Also in the November 7 TLS (belatedly on my desk) is a review of Lukas Erne’s Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist , in which Erne challenges the popularly accepted notion that Shakespeare was writing for viewers rather than readers. He shows that plays were being written for publication in Shakespeare’s time,…
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