Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
As we move into the Persian period of ancient history, and try to reconcile it with Daniel’s prophecies, we need to ask some hard questions about the interpretation of the data before us. One question concerns the reliability of the Biblical witness, and beyond that a second question concerns the…
Ewa Majewska Thompson: Understanding Russia: The Holy Fool in Russian Culture Ewa M. Thompson is Professor and Chairman of the Department of German and Slavic Studies at Rice University. In this seminal study, she investigates the concept of the "holy fool" as it exists in Russian culture and civilization. While…
The most cursory glance at the history of Western literature reveals that it has been deeply influenced by the Bible. Some of the greatest classics of Western literature draw their plots, characters, and ideas largely from Scripture; Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost are two of the most notable…
Each time the Scriptures recount the story of Moses’ birth and deliverance from Pharaoh, reference is made to two facts about that event. First, each text points out that Moses was "beautiful." Second, each text points out that Amram and Jochebed, his parents, hid him for three months (cf. Ex.…
Click HERE for Part 1. The Message of the Covenant Can we really say that the saints presently rule the world, and always have since Noah? Look around and you can see that the wicked rule in virtually every country on earth. There are wicked civilizations that rise Babelically age…
As we saw last time , we have come to the place in the study of Biblical chronology where it seems that we are forced to abandon the Bible itself as our primary source of information. If we assume that the seventy sevens of Daniel 9:24-27 are in fact weeks…
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W alter McDougall ( Promised Land, Crusader State , 4–5) divides the history of American foreign affairs into two testaments, summarized by the two phrases of the title. “Our Old Testament dominated the rhetoric and, for the most part, the practice of U.S. diplomacy from 1776 to the 1890s, and…
I n her TLS review of new books about Jane Austen, Devoney Looser comments on the irony that we think of Austen as a truthful, i.e., “factual,” novelist, a reporter of life as it was. In fact, “Austen's writings rarely fetishize facts. Her early foray into history writing famously describes…
T he Economist summarizes the notion of “information asymmetry” pioneered by George Akerlof and others. Using a used car lot a setting for a thought experiment, Akerlof showed (in a paper published in 1978) that the information asymmetry between buyers and sellers kills the market. Sellers can tell the good…
T he Wire is the best TV series I've ever seen. Also among the raunchiest. In an aside in an eccentric piece comparing the Fairie Queene to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit , Cambridge English scholar Joe Moshenska sketches an even more eccentric comparison of Spencer's poem to The Wire :…
L ike all right-thinking Americans, Emily Nussbaum is suitably horrified by Trump's election. But she grasps his appeal better than most. He won by being a better stand-up comic and shrugging off criticism by claiming he was just joking: “Trump was a hot comic, a classic Howard Stern guest. He…
I n her study of postmodern apocalypticism, Apocalyptic Transformation (xxiii–xxv), Elizabeth Rosen asks what effects secularization has on apocalyptic stories. The most obvious thing is a change in “how the deity is portrayed.” The perfect God of traditional theism is out; “secular deities are often imperfect characters, neither absolutely omniscient…
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