Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
After Elijah’s battered and depressed howling in the wilderness it must have seemed like the new prophet came eating and drinking. Which is a pattern we see again in the New Testament—John is explicitly identified with Elijah (Luke 1.17, Matthew 11.14), howling the truth in the wilderness that the people…
Reading Robert Conquest’s biography of Stalin 1 has opened new lines of meditation on Paul’s command in Colossians 3:9. But before turning to that, let me briefly indicate what Paul is not saying. He is not saying that there is no such thing as righteous deception, such as Jael practiced…
You won’t find wild lions today in Israel. But lions used to range much more widely than they do now, and in biblical times they were a menace that shepherds in Israel had to contend with. David did as a shepherd boy, and Amos—who “ was among the sheepbreeders of…
I would like to remedy a flaw for English speakers in the book of Genesis. A flaw that may seem innocuous, but we must remember where the devil lives...in the details. If we are to fear the Lord, it behooves our translation committees to ensure that the fearfulness of God…
While reading at my son’s baseball game this week, a mom from our school approached me and asked if I was reading Dante. I wasn’t, but our sons are both reading Divine Comedy in their sophomore literature class, so it was a reasonable question. What unfolded was a quick conversation…
In the first two essays in this series, I addressed the question of how the nations would learn about Israel’s Torah, in the second essay especially emphasizing the aesthetic aspects of Israel’s testimony. For we naturally wonder: How would people in Mesopotamia or Egypt, not to mention the rest of…
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Giorgio de Santillana ( Hamlet’s Mill , 59-60) gives a brief description of the sun’s precessional “year” as it moves through the constellations of the Zodiac: “The sun’s position among the constellations at the vernal equinox was the pointer that indicated the ‘hours’ of the precessional cycle - very long…
De Santillana ( Hamlet’s Mill , 68) on our the soporific of Darwin: “Our period may some day be called the Darwinian period, just as, we talk of the Newtonian period of two centuries ago. The simple idea of evolution, which it is no longer thought necessary to examine, spreads…
In a NYRB review of several new books on gay marriage, Edmund White reflects on the price paid by gays for the success of their efforts: “Why did mainstream America come to accept marriage equality? Gay leaders had made a convincing case that gay families were like straight families and…
When John first sees four multi-eyed living creatures, they are in the midst of the heavenly throne (Revelation 4:6-7). They lead the heavenly worship (4:8), but they don’t seem to act at all on earth. Then the Lamb takes the throne, and becomes the throne (5:6), displacing the creatures. And…
One of the most intriguing claims in Travis Ables’s Incarnational Realism is that “Christology and pneumatology do not operate on the same register; one is doctrinal, the other is the performative dimension of that doctrinal speech.” More fully: “The missions of the trinitarian persons do not necessarily entail distinct redemptive…
In his Sacred Geography of the Ancient Greeks , Jean Richer writes, “during more than two thousand years, the Phoenicians, the Hittites, the ancient Greeks, and then the Etruscans, the Carthaginians, and the R?mans, had patiently woven a fabric of correspondences between the sky, especIally the apparent course of the…
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