Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Why there is more to Jephthah than meets than eye It was not that long ago that I realized the Jephthah-story and the Jesus-story were basically the same story. Sounds crazy, I know. But here is a one-paragraph synopsis of both: The people of God have gone their own way,…
G.K. Chesterton famously said that the Gospels don’t reveal Jesus’ mirth. It’s true we never catch Jesus laughing. But can we believe He never did? I don’t think so. Laughter is human, and Jesus was fully human. Jesus promised that those who mourned would laugh. He mourned; would He not…
Matthew 2 has all the elements of an exodus story. There’s a murderous king, who slaughters Jewish babies. There’s a infant who will be Israel’s future deliverer, saved from the murderous king so He can later return to save His people and lead them to the Promised land. There’s an…
The calendar of Israel was primarily theological, centered on commemorating the salvific acts of God, but also agricultural, celebrating the creation-restoring effects of those salvific acts. The feasts of the first month celebrated the reviving of the world in the Spring, and typified the cutting off of the Savior in…
The chiastic shape corresponds to the shape of human life. This should not surprise us, because we are made in the image of God, and God is manifest in Word and Spirit. If we are living epistles, our lives will look a bit like the literary shape of the books…
Back in January, Venkatesh Rao wrote a fascinating post on the Ribbonfarm blog, discussing different forms of models of narrative. Engaging with Ursula LeGuin’s talk ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ , Rao explores her contrast between the (male) ‘hero narrative’ and the (female) ‘carrier-bag story’, and suggests a third…
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Kumar notes that the 1960s counter-culture set itself against everything in modernism: “Pop art and pop music, the ‘new wave’ in cinema and the ‘new novel’ in literature, thne elision of the boundaries between ‘art’ and ‘life,’ the cultivation of sensibility through sex and drugs rather than aesthetic contemplation of…
In a 1965 essay, Leslie Fiedler celebrated the new movements of the 1960s as post-modern, post-Freudian, post-Humanist, post-Protestant, post-white, post-male.
Kumar suggests that there is no useful distinction to be made between postmodernity as a socio-political concept and postmodernism as a cultural concept. All the instincts of postmodernists are against such a differentiation of spheres. For postmodernists, it is no longer useful to distinguish subsystems within the social world -…
Kumar defines modernism as an intellectual, cultural and artistic revolt against modernity. Yet modernism itself, especially as expressed in architecture, was complex and racked with internal contradictions: “It could denounce the ‘inauthentic’ present in the name of the future, as in Futurism and Constructivism; and it could with equal force…
At least two: The modernity of science and technology, the factory system and city planning, of bureacracy and management. And on the other hand the modernity of sensibility, literature, hedonism, the lust for ever-new experience. On the one hand, Industrialization; on the other, the Romanticism that challenged it. On the…
“Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation . . . All fixed, fast-frozen relationships . . . are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.” Zygmunt Bauman? No: Marx and Engels, in the Communist Manifesto .
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