Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In this essay we will think about how the whole Bible is structured as one Word of God. To begin with, there is only one Bible, not two. While we divide the Bible into Old and New Testaments, that division has no more meaning than divisions into chapters and verse,…
How should one badly bruised and inadequate church relate to another? (I am not addressing the blessed possessors of absolutely perfect churches, naturally.) I believe there are three things to bear in mind. First, we must be open to the values in other Christian traditions - even Roman Catholic and…
The third and sixth day have a second creative act. Note the chiastic arrangement of the material in these special acts and the parallelism between them, see the figure below. The author arranges the description of each day as a chiasm. Each line in the chiasm is mated with a…
Now the two of them were naked, the man and his woman, and they did not sense shame (Genesis 2:25) The nakedness of Adam and Eve requires several comments. First of all, against those who think that nakedness is what God intended for humanity as a permanent estate, we have…
I’ve been reflecting on the meaning of integration, and our longing for integration in a fragmented world. I’ve been connecting my own covenant epistemology further with the thought of scientist-philosopher Michael Polanyi, artist Makoto Fujimura, and Classical Christian metaphysician D.C. Schindler. In my last post , and now in this…
Luke 13:31-33 is one of the strangest passages in the Gospel of Luke. It begins with a time note that sounds emphatic “At that very hour.” Then, we are told of Pharisees bringing a message that Herod wants to kill Jesus! In His answer, Jesus speaks of a three day…
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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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