Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In the Bible, fatness is such a blessing, that it is especially hard to understand why wicked men are permitted to enjoy such a state. It requires a theodicy and faith in God. Thus: “For they have no pangs until death; their bodies are fat and sleek . They are…
[fve]http://vimeo.com/71901553[/fve]
The allusion to the Exodus story is contained in the first words of Deuteronomy 14:1 — “ye are the sons of Yahweh your God” — as well as in 14:2 in the use of the technical term translated “treasured possession,” “His own possession,” “peculiar people,” “precious people,” and so forth.…
I have argued that Deuteronomy 14:1-21 is an independent literary unit that applies the Third Word to the lives of Israelites from the time of Moses and Joshua. In this short pericope, Moses suggests broad and deep meaning by means of literary allusion to the stories of the creation and…
In his recently republished The New Creation , the late, delightful Herbert McCabe defends the priesthood of the plebs as roundly as anyone could want. Citing Hebrews, he claims that "there is an essential difference between the Christian community and the community of the Old Law, or any other religious…
Augustine famously prayed, “Our hearts our restless until they rest in You.” True indeed. Being creatures, we inherently sense our ontological poverty—our innate condition of dependence—and are compelled to find a sense of security. And it is also true—as Augustine’s own narrative painfully illustrates—that one of the things we most…
Showing page 190 of 309
Showing page 1 of 43
At the 1993 conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the Commonwealth, Marshall Sahlins was invited to provide “after-dinner entertainment.” His anthropological stand-up routine has been published as Waiting for Foucault, Still , most recently in 2002 by Sahlins’s own Prickly Paradigm Press. Sahlins thinks that atheism is the…
Amos Wilder’s Theopoetic , recently reprinted in Wipf & Stock’s Amos Wilder LIbrary, is a plea for a renewal of imagination, written with the taut elegance of a poet. Writing in 1976, Wilder saw himself fighting on two fronts - against the utilitarian spirit of American Protestantism on the one…
Howard Eilberg-Schwartz ( The Savage in Judaism ) traces most every form of impurity in ancient Israel back to issues of fertility. I don’t buy that overall, and he recognizes that it can’t cover everything (see his discussion of menstruation. 177-94, where he uncovers several overlapping schemas). The argument works…
Jesus has the key of David (Revelation 3:7), which allows him to open and shut. The statement is chiastic: A. who opens B. and no one shuts B’. and shuts A’. and no one opens. The sentence’s structure mimics the sentence’s content: It speaks of “opening” at the “open ends,”…
In a dense paragraph, Milbank (“Theology Without Substance, Part 1,” Journal of Literature and Theology , 1988) draws on Paolo Rossi’s Dark Abyss of Time describes how English and Neopolitan writers put Spinoza, Hobbes, and de Lapeyrere to work in defense of orthodoxy - even in defense of Scripture and…
Drawing from Robertson Smith, Howard Eilberg-Schwartz lists numerous biblical characters with animal names ( The Savage in Judaism , 116): Eglon means calf, Nahash is a serpent, Oreb is Raven and Ze’eb is a wolf. Seir the Horite has Shobal (young lion), Zibeon (hyena), Anah (wild ass), Dishon (antelope). Leah…
Showing page 649 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
