Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Place names become fraught with meaning by association with people and events. The name “Wittenberg” calls to mind Luther and the Reformation for Protestants and Catholics alike. Geneva has a wider range of associations, but the Reformation Wall, with its four main statues of William Farel, John Calvin, Theodore Beza,…
“…a mystery without a solution, a horror story without savagery, a nightmare in which all the watches stop at noonday…” The Bestial Gardens of Men Then they will say to the mountains, “Fall on us!” and to the hills, “Cover us!” (Luke 23:30) The following lines by Edgar Allan Poe,…
2 Samuel 11-12, which record David’s sin with Bathsheba and its aftermath, is structured chiastically: This arrangement highlights several things about the episode. It reinforces what is obvious from even a casual reading, that the transition in the story occurs with Nathan’s confrontation of David’s sin and David’s confession. Up…
Medieval bestiaries are packed with quaintly inaccurate information about animals, birds, and other created things. Foxes and snakes are devilish critters; stags, pelicans and elephants are Christlike in their various ways. Of course, the medievals picked this up from the Bible, where bestiary observations are fairly common. “Go to the…
What do Reformational Catholicism and craft beer have in common? The question seems to beg for a punchline. Better yet, it would be pretty good clickbait for an article on Katharina von Bora’s “spirited” contribution that helped spark the Protestant Reformation. Well, this is no joke and I am certainly…
Suffering Defined Suffering happens. We witness it all around us and experience it in our lives. It often comes from forces beyond our control. Suffering is inscrutable; it strikes unexpectedly, on a bright summer day or a cold winter night. We lament and are bewildered by suffering. But we are…
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In France, women have played a prominent political role through their involvement with the salons. To rise in society, one needed to please the women who served as guardians of the salons; and to rise politically one needed to rise in society. England, by contrast, was a nation of men’s…
In France, women have played a prominent political role through their involvement with the salons. To rise in society, one needed to please the women who served as guardians of the salons; and to rise politically one needed to rise in society. England, by contrast, was a nation of men’s…
Hobbes called it a “circular motion of the sovereign power,” but what he actually described in summarizing the Revolutionary-Restoration sequence was a chiasm: “it moved from King Charles I to the Long Parliament; from thence to the Rump; from the Rump to Oliver Cromwell; and thence back again from Richard…
The House of Commons, Rosenstock-Huessy argues, is a body, not a collection of individual units. MPs do not have, as US Representatives and Senators do, individual desks; there is only one table in Commons. And up to the time that Rosenstock-Huessy was writing, MPs were never addressed by name in…
Cromwell and his co-belligerents claimed to be aiming for the restoration of English liberties; they did not consider themselves rebels. Yet, in much English historiography, the Puritan Revolution goes down as the “Great Rebellion,” the term “restoration” having been snagged by the Stuarts who returned in 1660. Significantly, as Rosenstock-Huessy…
Rosenstock-Huessy points out the contrast between French and English attitudes toward “old” things. Quoting on Boutmy, he says, “’ Ancien regime or ‘old France’ is objectionable in France; ‘Old England’ is a eulogy.” He adds, “To have a ‘high old time’ is as reasonable in English as it is atrocious…
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