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Advent

Stretching Christmas

For many people Christmas comes on December 25 and is over December 26. The tree is taken down along with the lights and the other decorations, and everyone begins setting the house in order for the new year. No more Christmas hymns. No more celebrations (well, until New Year’s Eve).…

by Steve WilkinsDecember 24, 2016
ascension
Advent

Ascension and Incarnation

The Ascension and the Incarnation should not be disconnected in our Christmas thinking or celebrations. As N.T. Wright notes, the ascension is "a central and vital feature without which all sorts of other things start to go demonstrably wrong. . . . where the ascension has been ignored or misunderstood,…

by Roy AtwoodDecember 23, 2016
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Advent

Christmas Light

“In the Word was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness.” Thus John describes the incarnation of the Son. He comes as the living and life-giving light of the world. That’s good news. In the beginning, God spoke and light shone…

by Peter LeithartDecember 23, 2016
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Advent

The Spirit of Christmas

Christmas is all about Jesus. The angels announce Jesus’ birth, shepherds and wise men come to see Jesus, Herod wants to kill Jesus. We occasionally think of the Father who sent the Son, but we keep returning to the Son made flesh in Bethlehem’s manger. Meanwhile, as always, the Spirit…

by Peter LeithartDecember 22, 2016
nativity
Advent

The Humility of God

Christmas is about many things, but one of the chief things revealed in the gospel of Christmas is the humility of God. We don't often think of humility as an attribute of God. If God is glorious and exalted, we think, He must be haughty and proud and self-centered. We…

by Peter LeithartDecember 21, 2016
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Advent

Advent of Unity

John famously begins his Gospel with a piece of theology: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Matthew starts with a genealogy. John celebrates Advent with a hymn, Matthew with a list. For John, Jesus is the Word of creation…

by Peter LeithartDecember 20, 2016

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Europe’s Jews

T he essays in Edward Alexander’s forthcoming Jews Against Themselves are an excoriating assault on Jewish “apostates”—Jews who, in the words of Maimonides, separate themselves “from the community” or “hold aloof from the congregation of Israel” and is “indifferent when they are in distress.” In Maimonides’s opinion, such no longer…

February 9, 2015
Shakespeare

Buying Up the Bard

The TLS reviewer of Stephen Grant’s Collecting Shakespeare summarizes some of the intrigue, skullduggery, and determination that lie behind the creation of Washington’s Folger Shakespeare library: “During their long marriage, the diminutive couple (he was five foot four, she five foot) devoted themselves to collecting books, pictures and objects (relics…

February 9, 2015

Age and Time

“One could say that age is to time what place is to space,” says Robert Pogue Harrison ( Juvenescence , 3), and he’s surprising that with all the attention given by philosophers to time, so few make the connection with age. Even Heidegger, who understood time as “a kind of…

February 6, 2015

Expanding Temple

First there is only a tabernacle in the wilderness. Yahweh’s house, by itself, surrounded by a curtain. No priests live on the tabernacle grounds; the sanctuary is bounded off from everyone. By the time of Samuel, the little boy is sleeping in “the temple” at Shiloh. It’s still a tent,…

February 6, 2015

Original Monotheism

Winfried Corduan’s In the Beginning God is largely an effort to rehabilitate the reputation and theory of Catholic linguist Wilhelm Schmidt, whose 12-volume Der Ursprung der Gottesidee (1912-54) argued that monotheism was the original form of religious belief. As Corduan describes it, the “narrative behind the method” assumes that peoples…

February 6, 2015

Trinity, Tabernacle, and Mathematics

I confess. I’m a sucker for books on the Trinity, and for books on the tabernacle. When someone combines these two topics in a discussion of the foundations of mathematics, as Vern Poythress does in Redeeming Mathematics , I’m hooked. Poythress has been busy redeeming nearly everything recently - Science…

February 6, 2015

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