Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
21. Under three things the earth quakes. And under four, it cannot bear up. 22. Under a slave when he becomes king, And a fool when he is satisfied with food, 23. Under an odious woman when she gets a husband, And a maidservant when she supplants her mistress. The…
We have looked at the prima facie evidence for a short chronology in Ezra-Nehemiah, a chronology that assumes that the Artaxerxes of Ezra 7ff. and Nehemiah is in fact Darius. This month we examine the argument against the short chronology. There is only one argument, and that is that the…
The Priestly Genealogy Jeshua the high priest, who returned with Zerubbabel, was not a young man at the time. We know this because his father, Jehozadak, was taken into captivity (1 Chron. 6:15). Thus was 50 years before the decree of Cyrus (2 Kings 25:18-22, by implication). Jehozadak’s father Seraiah,…
Thomas C. Oden, After Modernity . . . What? Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1990. Reviewed by Rev. Jeffrey Meyers. Reading Oden’s After Modernity . . . What? was tonic. There were passages that launched me out of my chair with a hoot to pace the office floor — of course, the…
Matthew records that Jesus "withdrew" to Galilee to begin His public ministry there after He "heard that John had been delivered up" (Mt. 4:12). Matthew’s typically matter-of-fact style veils the truly remarkable character of Jesus’ withdrawal. Matthew has been presenting Jesus as the Messiah, the Seed of Abraham and Son…
John Brown called this one of the most difficult passages in the entire epistle to the Hebrews, and Hebrews is no easy book. Several questions confront us as we read and meditate on these verses. First, in what sense did the Old Testament saints described in verses 4-38 not receive…
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“R emember His wonders which He does,” the Levites sing when the ark is brought to Jerusalem (1 Chronicles 16:12a), doubtless referring preeminently to the wonders of the exodus but more distantly to the wonder of doing/making creation. At creation and in the exodus, God's wonders are the wonders of…
T oward the end of the rambunctious Paris Review interview , sometimes a meta-interview about the process of interviewing, Mark Helprin answers the question, Why do you write? As always, he answers circuitously, by contrasting creativity in pre- and modern art: . . . in a secular world, each artist…
I n a NYRB review of Anthony Gottlieb’s Dream of Enlightenment , Thomas Nagel corrects Gottlieb’s account of Hobbes’s moral philosophy. He lucidly summarizes Hobbes’s moral argument for absolutism: Hobbes’s theory, and what led to his being attacked as a moral nihilist, was his refusal to appeal to any concern…
I n his poignant, deeply personal New York essay on his distraction addiction, Andrew Sullivan reflects on the silence of sacred places: “From the moment I entered a church in my childhood, I understood that this place was different because it was so quiet. The Mass itself was full of…
M axwell Anderson’s forthcoming Antiquities surveys the world of antiquities, summarizing law, history of collection, the difference between the interests of archeologists and antiquities dealers, forgeries and their detection, the market in antiquities. Everything you’d want to know. Anderson places the rise of interest in antiquities in the context of…
S tuart Banner attempts to draw the fine line between investment and gambling in his forthcoming Speculation . Among other things, his book is a history of America’s double-mindedness about speculative investing. Visitors to the early US regularly made comments like this from German journalist Francis Grund: “An American merchant…
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