Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Summary : The Bible is a multi-faceted text. As a result, it can fruitfully be analyzed in many ways. Pace, context, flow, imagery: all of these aspects of the Biblical text are significant and instructive. Here, by way of illustration, I analyze Gen. 38 in a range of different ways,…
Summary: The Bible is a multi-faceted text. As a result, it can fruitfully be analysed in many ways. Pace, context, flow, imagery: all of these aspects of the Biblical text are significant and instructive. Here, by way of illustration, I analyse Gen. 38 in a range of different ways, and…
The closing chapters of the Bible bring to fulfillment the mission inaugurated in the opening chapters of the Bible: the dwelling place of God expands to fill the entire new creation. The story of Scripture concludes having achieved God’s original intent for His people in the Garden of Eden, and…
Oddly, the nature of pre -modern economies plays a central role in today’s policy debate over economic globalization and neo-liberalism. Analysts take ancient non-market economies as the standard against which to measure the economic and social effects of the market system. Scholars compare the distribution of economic goods and services…
In part one of this essay, I mentioned that the story of Zacchaeus includes not only many details that point to other passages in Luke, but also details that point to the Old Testament, though we might not initially think of them. The first detail I have in mind is…
The story of Zacchaeus includes numerous interesting details that link this story with others in the Gospel of Luke. There are also details that tie the story of Zacchaeus to the Old Testament in ways that we might not initially take note of. In the Gospel of Luke, the story…
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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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