Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I believe hymnals should be shorter than they are. Much shorter. 100 hymns at most, let’s say. I imagine that this will be a hard one to swallow for most of my readers, so I will attempt to bolster my argument as best I can. I can’t think of any…
Joshua is never called a king in the Bible. Yet while lacking the title, Joshua possesses the trappings of biblical kingship to a degree that it seems warranted to consider him a royal figure. There are lots of reasons for thinking this. In a 1981 Journal of Biblical Literature article,…
God speaks. He is not silent. He has designed humanity for reception of such communication and also to speak on His behalf. This speaking is not simply happenstance. It is not just a curious quirk about humanity. It is intrinsic to who we are that we speak and shape the…
One evening, years ago, home from college for Christmas break, I dreamt that I was playing the piano, passionately and well, in the church sanctuary beneath the parsonage in the renovated mansion in rural New Hampshire where my father was the minister. It was something of a lucid dream because…
I’m a big worrier. Always have been. Some of my earliest memories are of being anxious to the point of getting sick, sometimes for trivial reasons. My mind moves a million miles a minute, wondering what will happen in 5 minutes, or tomorrow, or next week, or in ten years.…
“The sun had gone up on the earth when Lot came to Zoar. And the LORD rained on Sodom and on Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the LORD from heaven, and he devastated those cities and the whole valley and all those dwelling in the cities and the growth of…
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Saussure argues that syntagmatic relations are more like multiplication than addition. Adding - eux to desir is not putting together “independent units”; rather the two “form a product, a combination of interdependent elements, their value deriving solely from their mutual contributions within a higher unit.” At another level, we can…
Would Saussure have agreed with Barr’s challenge to the notion that there is a difference between Greek and Hebraic mentalities evident in the differences between the languages? Barr appeals to Saussure at one or two points in his book ( Semantics ), and his project as a whole is reliant…
The English civil war, that is. Peter Harrison ( ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment ) traces the notion of comparative religious study to the confessional disputes in England, and the “diachronic pluralism” of the English monarchy: “As Locke put it, the kings and queens of post-Reformation England…
At a couple of points in his Course , Saussure suggests that the “primary characteristic of the spoken sequence is its linearity.” It is a “chain,” a “line.” I find this questionable, but he makes interesting use of the image: “In itself, it is merely a line, a continuous ribbon…
A “sign” in Saussure’s terminology consists of a signification (a concept or idea) and a signal (the “sound pattern” associated with the idea). He suggests some analogies: “This unified duality has often been compared with that of the human being, comprising body and soul. But the parallel is unsatisfactory. A…
Saussure associates langue with collective social realities; it is the system created by society and existing, almost identically, in every member of a linguisitic community. He associates parole , in turn, with individual expressions within the system. The system is impervious to change: “changes are never made to the system…
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