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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In a 1983 article in Past & Present , Lawrence Stone presented evidence that showed a precipitous drop in the homicide rate in England from the 14th to the 20th century. Why? Stone thinks that Elias’s Civilizing Process had something to do with it: “Yves Castan has shown with great…
Critchley ( Philosophy and the Return of Violence: Studies from this Widening Gyre , 64- 8) gives a lucid analysis of Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” (in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings ), organized around Benjamin’s distinctions between law-making and law-preserving violence, between political and the general strike, and between…
In his essay in Philosophy and the Return of Violence: Studies from this Widening Gyre , Simon Critchley describes Zizek’s Barlebyan politics in Shakespearean terms: “Zizek is, I think, a Slovenian Hamlet.” He “dreams of a divine violence, a cataclysmic, purifying violence of the sovereign ethical deed,” but is left…
At the end of his massively documented The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade , Andrew Feinstein notes the blurring of lines between formal and informal arms markets, the black and the white markets that merge into gray: “While the large defence contractors like BAE and Lockheed Martin -…
Back in 1944, Walter Oakes predicted Marxianly that late capitalism would naturally develop a “permanent war economy.” Defining a war economy as one where “the government’s expenditures for war . . . become a legitimate and significant end-purpose of economic activity.” Capitalism, Oakes claimed, seeks equilibrium that reduces unemployment and…
Some political theorists have thought that we can live like bees - sociable without command, law, speech, punishments. Hobbes demurs ( Hobbes: Leviathan , II.17). And not because we are superior to bees. We can’t live like bees because we are “continually in competition for honour and Dignity” and thus…
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