Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In a brief article entitled, “The Theology of Old Testament Sacrifice," Gordon Wenham, expanding on a comment about ritual from anthropologist Monica Wilson, states: We resort to ritual when we want to express our deepest feelings. Consider the rituals used in greeting people in our society: a nod, a handshake,…
Everyone here in Cambridge is talking about sacrifice. My supervisor, Dr. John Milbank, is working on a book on gift in which he is dealing with recent literature on sacrifice. The graduate seminar in Systematics during Michaelmas Term focused on the theme of sacrifice. The first presenter was Dr. Ian…
Protestant-Catholic debates about the sacraments have usually taken the form of debates about sacramental efficacy. Protestants claim that Catholics believe that sacraments work ex opere operato , virtually a magical view of the sacraments. A priest goes through the motions and says the hocus-pocus and "presto!" the sacraments confer grace.…
When Israel came out of Egypt, she was a collection of tribes descended from the Tribe of Abraham. Tribalism drops out of history into the "world" by looking back to ancestors and by orienting to the spirits that govern the world. The world must not be manipulated, because to do…
Angels are the mediators of the Old Creation, as Eugenio Corsini has rightly pointed out in his commentary, The Apocalypse. For this reason, argues Corsini, the book of Revelation must have to do with the final end of the Old Creation order, which he associates with the work of Jesus…
Our procedure in "Through New Eyes Volume 2" thus far has been to lay out the general overview of history and its meaning as the Bible presents it. My hope is to fill this out in four major sections, corresponding to the four ages and the four testaments in the…
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In his Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things , George Lakoff tells about the Australian aboriginal tribe of the Dyirbal, who speak a language that classifies everything into four categories. One of these, “balan,” includes “women, bandicoots, dogs, platypuses, echidnas, some fish, birds, fireflies, scorpions, crickets, the hairy mary grub, anything…
In the delightful opening chapter to his Concept of Mind (1949), Gilbert Ryle explains that Descartes’s mind-body dualism (“ghost in the machine,” as Ryle famously put it) was a response to the mechanization of the world: “Descartes found in himself two conflicting motives. As a man of scientific genius he…
In the delightful opening chapter to his Concept of Mind (1949), Gilbert Ryle explains that Descartes’s mind-body dualism (“ghost in the machine,” as Ryle famously put it) was a response to the mechanization of the world: “Descartes found in himself two conflicting motives. As a man of scientific genius he…
In his book on Hegel, Charles Taylor summarizes the crique Hegel brings against Descartes. For Hegel, Descartes aims to unite thought and external reality, but the manner he uses to do that ends up losing both. The cogito is an “assertion of an immediate identity between thought and being,” an…
According to the account of Raymond Martin and John Barresi in their recent book on the rise and fall of the soul and self, several of the church fathers answered the dilemma raised by personal continuity through death and resurrection by proposing a relational view of identity: “What that means,…
Ethnic identity politics, Eric Hobsbawm argues, arises as an effort to established impermeable boundaries in a situation where boundaries are permeable: “The very fluidity of ethnicity in urban societies made its choice as the only criterion of the group arbitrary and artificial. In the USA, except for Blacks, Hispanics, and…
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