Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Should anthropological categories and tools be applied to Judaism? Seems a narrow and academic question, of interest to maybe ten people on the planet. It's one of the many virtues of Howard Eilberg-Schwartz's 1990 The Savage In Judaism to show that the question is a central one in the origins…
Christians are often accused of being obsessed with sexual sin. Why can't two people, of whatever sex, do whatever they please in the enclosure of their own room? Who is hurt if a guy wants to get off looking at tantalizing pictures and videos on his computer? What's the big…
“No one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man. And then he will plunder his house” (Mark 3:27 NKJV). Much commentary on the Revelation seems oblivious to its allusions to the Pentateuch (although there are many that do enlighten us…
Leigh M. Trevaskis's 2011 monograph, Holiness, Ethics and Ritual in Leviticus , is an outstanding contribution to the study of Leviticus. His main thesis is directed at the world of Old Testament scholarship, in which there is a consensus that the ritual laws of Leviticus 1-16 come from a school…
Richard Ounsworth begins his Joshua Typology in the New Testament with an excellent discussion of what he calls "ontological" typology, which he handily summarizes in four points. Typology involves "correspondences between real historical events, personalities, institutions, etc. described in scripture," a correspondence that is discerned (not created) by the reader…
Baylor University Press is sponsoring a reception to celebrate the official release of Peter Leithart's Gratitude: An Intellectual History . The reception will be held at the First Things offices in Manhattan on Thursday, March 6, at 6 PM. For more details, click here .
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Judith Gundry's contribution to The Child in the Bible examines the place of children in Mark's gospel, with particular focus on the episode of Jesus blessing the children. It's an illuminating essay. Mark includes no infancy narratives, but regularly shows Jesus exerting the power of the kingdom to rescue and…
In his Happiness Paradox , Ziyad Marar explores the sources of "justification." Humiliation is a uniquely human form of suffering. How do we deal with it? Our strategies for staving off humiliation are strategies of "justification." Freud offers some possibilities, He "enumerates a range of ways we avoid this kind…
Virginia Woolf, atheist though she was, couldn't avoid religious language when she spoke about her writing. Writing began from "a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words." It was her "shock-receiving capacity is…
Robert Brandom ( Tales of the Mighty Dead , 13-14) observes a continuity between Hegel and Kant: Both take concepts as "norms for judgment. They determine proprieties of application to particulars of terms that, because of the normative role they play in such judgments, express universals." But then Hegel adds…
Did the Council of Trent allow communion in both kinds, in bread and wine? The answer is complicated. Nathan Mitchell ( Oxford History of Christian Worship , 338-9) writes that "After intense behind-the-scenes negotiations, Pope Pius IV authorized communion in both species for German (16 April 1564). In effect, the…
Reviewing Carlos Eire's Reformations at First Things , Eamon Duffy claims that "Protestantism 'desacralized' the world by accepting an essentially binary division of reality into spirit and matter. That division was expressed in Reformation iconoclasm and the rejection of the notion that material objects—the bread and wine of the Mass,…
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