Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In the Bible, fatness is such a blessing, that it is especially hard to understand why wicked men are permitted to enjoy such a state. It requires a theodicy and faith in God. Thus: “For they have no pangs until death; their bodies are fat and sleek . They are…
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The allusion to the Exodus story is contained in the first words of Deuteronomy 14:1 — “ye are the sons of Yahweh your God” — as well as in 14:2 in the use of the technical term translated “treasured possession,” “His own possession,” “peculiar people,” “precious people,” and so forth.…
I have argued that Deuteronomy 14:1-21 is an independent literary unit that applies the Third Word to the lives of Israelites from the time of Moses and Joshua. In this short pericope, Moses suggests broad and deep meaning by means of literary allusion to the stories of the creation and…
In his recently republished The New Creation , the late, delightful Herbert McCabe defends the priesthood of the plebs as roundly as anyone could want. Citing Hebrews, he claims that "there is an essential difference between the Christian community and the community of the Old Law, or any other religious…
Augustine famously prayed, “Our hearts our restless until they rest in You.” True indeed. Being creatures, we inherently sense our ontological poverty—our innate condition of dependence—and are compelled to find a sense of security. And it is also true—as Augustine’s own narrative painfully illustrates—that one of the things we most…
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In his lovely book of meditations on art, New York City, 9/11, American culture, Japan, and Christianity ( Refractions: A Journey of Faith, Art, and Culture ), Makoto Fujimura tells the story of Sen no Rikyu, “the sixteenth-century tea master who is most responsible for the development of the art…
Toward the end of “On Seeking God,” Nicholas of Cusa has this to say: “when an artists seeks the face of a king in a block of wood, the artists rejects everything else that is limited except the face itself.  For the artist sees in the wood, through the concept…
Mary Douglas highlighted the analogies between body and social body in her work on Levitical defilements.  Protecting the integrity and wholness of the individual body symbolized the aspirations of Israelite society for a whole and well-protected social body, without intrusions from outside or seepage from inside. At the same time,…
Mary Douglas writes in Leviticus As Literature that the word translated as “swarming” or “creeping” should instead be translated as “teeming,” with its connotations of fertility.  Israel is to avoid teeming things, Douglas argues, because Israel is to make a distinction between covenant and fertility.  Israel is not to hate…
Nazirites were separated to Yahweh’s service and devoted to His holy war.  Priests too were “separated” ( nazir , Leviticus 22:2). But Israel as a whole was a nation of devoted warriors.  That is the whole rationale for the laws of cleanliness, that the sons of Israel will be “nazired”…
Von Balthasar says that the “ethos of the theology in Bonaventure is . . . quite different from the ethos in Thomas Aquinas, whose philosophical point of view tries to reflect the order of the world as rigorously and clearly as possible.  In Bonaventure, there is something defeated from the…
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