Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Malachi Martin, The Keys of This Blood: The Struggle for World Dominion Between Pope John Paul II, Mikhail Gorbachev & the Capitalist West (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990). Reviewed by Peter J. Leithart. The subtitle of this massive volume gives a good idea of its major theme. Martin, the…
The Abomination of Desolation: PART 1 The Abomination of Desolation: PART 2 What I intend to do in this series of studies is this: First, in the present essay we shall survey the occurrences of the Abomination of Desolation in the Bible in a cursory way, in order to get…
We previously surveyed what is meant by the abomination of desolation . We suggested that it refers to sacrilegious acts performed by the religious leaders of Israel, captained by their High Priest, right in front of God’s face in the Temple. Later studies in this series will provide evidence for…
Throughout history, the Christian Church has had to guard against the heresy of gnosticism. Gnosticism is not an ordinary heresy, because it does not manifest itself as a set of defined beliefs. Rather, gnosticism is a tendency, a tendency to replace the historic facts of Christianity with philosophical ideas. Gnosticism…
In Rite Reasons Nos. 9-12, I discussed the errors of Roman Catholicism, Anglo-Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodoxy. I have had several requests to comment further on the so-called Seventh Ecumenical Council, held at Nicaea in A.D. 787. That Council ordered the excommunication of anyone who rejects the veneration of icons. 1…
The drink offering or libation ( nesek ) is mentioned in only three places in the book of Leviticus. When the sheaf of the firstfruits was waved before the Lord, a grain offering was to be burned, along with "its libation, a fourth of a hin of wine [approx. one…
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Prudentius’s Psychomachia (5 th century AD) is one of the first and one of the most influential of medieval allegories. It is the source of the battle of Virtue and Vice that was one of the key themes of medieval allegory, which carries right into the Elizabethan allegory of Spenser's…
R omantic thinkers like Johann Gottfried Herder, developed an organic conception of nationhood. For Herder, a nation is an extended family, and so a perfect nation, the most natural state, is “one nation, an extended family with one national character." (I rely on this essay by Richard White.) People have…
Nations are “imagined communities,” and one of the ways nations imagine themselves is to imagine themselves as very, very old. The Finnish epic, the Kalevala , serves as an illustration of the nexus between ancient literature and national identity. Anderson writes ( Imagined Communities , 74-5), “In the eighteenth century…
In a contribution to Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works Teodolinda Barolini contrasts the love poetry of Petrarch's Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (also known as the Canzoniere ) with that of Dante. Petrarch continues the courtly paradigm. His interest is in the shifting psychology and drama of the male…
In his E nglish Literature in the Sixteenth Century , CS Lewis makes two deflationary comments about the effects of Renaissance humanism. First, “The ‘barbarous’ books [of medieval Latin] have survived in the only sense that really matters: they are used as their authors meant them to be used. It…
Conrad Rudolph's The Mystic Ark is the product of impressive scholarship. Its focus is on the image of the mystic ark, a complex cosmic portrait showing “the Majesty” (looking like Jesus) enthroned, flanked by angels, holding a large disk, inscribed with a square turned sideways like a diamond. Inside the…
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