Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In the 48th year, the third month, and the fourteenth night, while I slept in my bed, I was taken in vision to Xanadu and set upon a high hill. Looking to the west, I saw a large building, surrounded with gardens and fountains, walks and gravestones, and a bell…
‘Tis the season to be informed–sometimes in gentleness, often with vigor–by a variety of Christians (and others) 1 claiming that it is wrong to celebrate Christmas. I have no desire to force anyone to celebrate Christmas against their will. Indeed, it would be insulting to the high holiday to pretend…
Part 2: The Enoch Factor Back in Open Book 21 we discussed "The Enoch Factor." Because that was several years ago (May 1994) and many people have begun reading this letter since that time, we shall return to the subject here and expand what we wrote at that time. After…
Day 6. The sixth day provides the creation of land animals and of humanity. As we saw above, the second day spills over to the first half of the third day, for only at that point did God say that it was good. Similarly, it seems that the fifth day…
During the past two decades, the "quest of the historical Jesus" has entered a new phase. The first incarnation of the quest was rudely shaken by the publication of Albert Schweitzer’s classic Quest of the Historical Jesus , easily the most devastating and funniest work of New Testament scholarship ever…
At the 1997 Biblical Horizons Summer Conference, the Rev. Jeffrey Meyers presented a series of remarkable lectures on the gospel of Mark. Among his many insightful comments, he suggested that the second gospel continues where the first gospel ends; Matthew ends with Jesus saying "Go" (Matthew 28:19), and Mark’s shows…
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Isaiah 65 piles up charges of idolatry and impurity against Israel. They are supposed to offer continuous sacrifices, but their sacrifices are a continuous provocation (65:3). They build their altars from bricks rather than from stones, as the law requires (65:3). The sacrificial smoke doesn’t sooth Yahweh but is an…
In an essay at Slate , David Auerbach tells a story about John Harris, a game-programmer: “While working on an 8-bit Atari port of Frogger in the early 1980s, Harris said, “’ glued my hands to the keyboard.’ One day he started programming midafternoon, losing himself in work. The next…
P oet Kenneth Goldsmith gives a taxonomy of smartness and dumbness. There are various permutations. He prefers dumb, but it has to be smart dumb: “There is dumb dumb and there is smart dumb. There is also smart smart. Dumb dumb is plain dumb and smart smart is plain smart.…
In a 1987 review of Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason , Neil Wilson observes that for Sloterdijk “cynicism is enlightenment turned sour: a sourness which results from the self-denial that self-survival in a society dominated by instrumental rationality requires” (55). It is not a new attitude, but an ancient…
Peter Sloterdijk distinguishes in his Critique of Cynical Reason (139-40) between the objectifying and distancing aims of Enlightenment thought and the inescapable “physiognomic sense” of life among fleshly humans: “Whereas the process of civilization, whose core is constituted by the sciences, teaches us to distance ourselves from people and things…
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