Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Along His journey to Jerusalem, Jesus stops frequently to have meals, three times with Pharisees (7:37-50; 11:37-54; 14:1-35). Meals were central to Jesus’ ministry. He comes “eating and drinking” (Luke 7:34). While His meals are not just for refreshment, they are opportunities for teaching the protocols of the kingdom. Meals…
Time as a realm of participation can be difficult for us imaginatively to grasp. While music is a profoundly temporal art, exploring the medium of time like no other, most of our temporal experience seems decidedly unmusical in character, disjointed and unorchestrated. The form in which we naturally discover time…
John devotes much attention to Jesus’ burial clothes. He tells us that Nicodemus brought about a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes to spice Jesus body, and that He was bound in linen wrappings. We find out that His body and His head were wrapped separately. (John 19:39-40; 20:6-7). When…
Thinking about time in terms of music also helps us to appreciate its unity and inner relations. Henri Bergson observes our cultural habit of dividing time into discrete moments, and conceiving of these as if akin to objects in a spatial succession. [1] Against such a notion, Bergson argues for…
As we attend to these and other aspects of music’s temporality, Begbie suggests, we will find means by which to resist some of our habitual modern ways of conceptualizing time, most especially our tendency to conceive of time as if it were a homogeneous set of technologically quantifiable units laid…
The Hidden Dimension In many fields of scientific study, the apparent complications and contradictions are dispelled once the internal logic is perceived. Biblical hermeneutics is no different, since the author of Creation is the Author of the Word. The Bible’s literary labyrinth radiates organically from an algorithm so simple it…
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A TLS reviewer of Will Self’s recent Liver compares Self’s work with that of the late David Foster Wallace: “He shared with Self a willingness to experiment with genre, pastische and several other acutely artificial literary devices, as well as a sense of the grotesque, a liking for long words…
With his rock star style and his intoxicating brew of high and pop culture, Zizek seems to be a paradigmatic pomo. Not so, says Terry Eagleton: “If he steals some of the postmodernists’ clothes, he has little but contempt for their multiculturalism, anti-universalism, theoretical dandyism and modist obsession with culture.…
In a largely negative review of John and Carol Garrard’s Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent ( TNR , December 31), Leon Aron notes the importance of Orthodoxy in contemporary Russian politics: “Orthodoxy is now all the rage among the Russian elite. The formerly godless KGB and Komsomol graduates who rule the country…
Since the patristic period, the parable of the laborers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16) has been detached from its context and understood as a parable about Jews and Gentiles (Irenaeus) or about early and late conversion (Origen). Those are, I think, valid uses or applications of the parable, but the…
Several times in her Sacred Power, Sacred Space (Oxford), Jeanne Halgren Kilde makes odd comments about the gnostic emphasis on Jesus’ humanity. Like this: “Although Gnostics had struggled mightily to emphasize Jesus’ humanity, the concept of the holy Trinity, and with it the divinity of Christ, became orthodox. Yet the…
Now here’s a wonder. In his recent The Contested Public Square (IVP), Greg Forster says that in the early centuries the church developed “a thoroughly - and irreversibly - apolitical understanding of its own existence and mission.” Irreversible, that is, until it was reversed. Less that forty pages later, Forster…
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