Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The story of Judges 19 and the subsequent chapters are some of the most shocking and appalling accounts in all of Scripture. The callousness of the old host and the Levite, and the monstrous brutality of the men of Gibeah, leaves us feebly scrabbling for words by which to surmount…
David has become king. He has conquered the capital city of Jerusalem. He has brought the ark of Yahweh into the city and placed it in a tent. He has stationed Levites at the tent to offer sacrifices of praise. An anomaly hits him: He has a cedar-paneled palace, and…
In Part 2 of this series we traced what we have of the development of the epiclesis in the liturgy of the Church. In this third and final part we’ll look at the theological implications of this and how we may apply what we’ve learned. As we saw in Part…
In a 2014 piece published in First Things , I offered a "wish list" for Protestant churches, a checklist for a future catholic Protestantism. The wish list doesn't cover everything. It doesn't mention those things that Protestants, especially Evangelicals, already do, often exceedingly well, things like missions and evangelism and…
In the first part of this series we examined the meaning of “blessing” in Scripture and its parallels in Jewish liturgical tradition, but did not find anything that we could properly call an epiclesis (an invocation of the Holy Spirit). We did find examples of invocation of Jesus to “come”…
When the Aaronic priests were ordained, the blood of the ram of "filling” was placed on the lobe of the right ear, the right thumb, and the right big toe (Lev. 8:22-24). Similarly, the cleansing rite for a leper included smearing the right ear lobe, thumb, and big toe with…
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The Winter 2004 issue of The Wilson Quarterly has several intriguing articles on shopping and the institution of the shopping mall. The articles cover the rise of the shopping, consumer culture; the strategies behind the arrangement of various departments of a mall store; and moral concerns with materialism and hedonism.…
A review of a new history of modernity in the TLS raises a number of intriguing questions. The author of the volume claims that the age of nations is over, and that history writing has to catch up. History writing is still too much stuck in the rapidly vanishing world…
A student points out a weakness in Stanley Fish ‘s reader-response treatment of Milton’s Satan, the notion that Milton deliberately makes Satan attractive and powerful not because Milton is of the devil’s party but because he is trying to run the reader through the same experience of temptation that Adam…
A student points out a weakness in Stanley Fish ‘s reader-response treatment of Milton’s Satan, the notion that Milton deliberately makes Satan attractive and powerful not because Milton is of the devil’s party but because he is trying to run the reader through the same experience of temptation that Adam…
I. Sir Reginald Piddleby-Squeak was in a pickle. The pickle he was in was no ordinary pickle, but a pickle of the most unusual size and sourness, a pickle from which he had no prospects of being rapidly extracted. He expected at any moment that he would begin turning green…
Introduction Elizabethans viewed Rome through two historical lenses. On the one hand, Rome was for Elizabethans the great civilization of antiquity. They knew less of Greece than we do, and almost nothing of ancient Egypt or Babylon, much less China. When they traced their cultural genealogy, they traced it back…
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