Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I thought it might be good to put this up here, since it is 14 years old, and itself reflects earlier discussion. From this you can see that we at BH have been considering this notion for quite some time. Clearly, the last word has not been said. — James…
Hopefully, my commentary on James will be out later this year. But here are a few chiasms for your consideration. I think the James 5 chiasm orginally came from Doug Jordan. The entire book of James is focused on how the pastors and leaders (“brothers”) of the church use their…
In my first post I noted that the parables of Jesus were not simply illustrative stories. They are really nothing like the kind of simple, homely illustrations that preachers often use to explain difficult concepts to their congregations. Just to be clear: there’s nothing wrong with illustrating one’s sermonic statements.…
Ephesians is often treated as a pure type example of the Pauline method that “the indicative preceds the imperative.” But what Paul does first is pray . Simply reading verse 3 and following involves readers in a prayer of thanksgiving to God–and much more so for those listening to the…
Yesterday, I took part with my oldest son in a church-sponsored city outreach project (not because I’m especially prone to such behavior but because my son has a Boy Scout requirement that this would help him meet). Before we were sent out on our various jobs, the leader gave a…
There is a scene in Prince Caspian , the second in C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia that helps explain why it is we have four Gospels, that is four accounts of the Good News of Jesus Christ—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. It is the account of Lucy’s longed-for experience…
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Of all the people I’ve seen on film recently, the one I’d most want to be is David Berlinski, whom Ben Stein interviewed extensively in his Paris apartment that reeked with sophistication and culture. Berklinski, by his own definition a “secular Jew” with no memory of Hebrew, has just published…
In an intriguing piece in TNR , writer Cinque Henderson - who identifies himself as one of the few remaining Clinton supporters among African-Americans - explains Obama’s use of “hoodwinked” and “bamboozled” (not the first words to spring to Obama’s lips, one would think) in the South Carolina primary: “It…
Kristeva says that contemporary culture separates affects from language, which leads to a loss of soul. Souls are empty. To help, our culture offers drugs and entertainment. Drugs flatten experience to a drone; entertainment dazzles momentarily with two-dimensional images. So do our solutions increase the problem. Flat remedies for flat…
Kristeva’s distinction of semiotic and symbolic is intended to overcome the dualism of traditional linguistic theories, the dualism of body and language, or matter and language. For Kristeva, the “semiotic” is the way drives are organized or “discharged” in language, and thus includes everything that is meaningful in language but…
Julia Kristeva notes that Saussure’s linguistic theory permits “linguistics to claim a logical, mathematical formalization on the one hand, but on the other, it definitely prevents reducing a language or text to one law or one meaning.” This latter point is true because by splitting the sign into signified and…
Desmond thinks that dialectic makes some gains: It affirms the “complex sense of unity,” appreciates mediation, critiques dualism, defends the “interplay and community of immanence and transcendence.” But dialectic cannot be the final moment of metaphysics. Why? “The problem is that if we privilege self-mediation and erect this into the…
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