Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Along His journey to Jerusalem, Jesus stops frequently to have meals, three times with Pharisees (7:37-50; 11:37-54; 14:1-35). Meals were central to Jesus’ ministry. He comes “eating and drinking” (Luke 7:34). While His meals are not just for refreshment, they are opportunities for teaching the protocols of the kingdom. Meals…
Time as a realm of participation can be difficult for us imaginatively to grasp. While music is a profoundly temporal art, exploring the medium of time like no other, most of our temporal experience seems decidedly unmusical in character, disjointed and unorchestrated. The form in which we naturally discover time…
John devotes much attention to Jesus’ burial clothes. He tells us that Nicodemus brought about a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes to spice Jesus body, and that He was bound in linen wrappings. We find out that His body and His head were wrapped separately. (John 19:39-40; 20:6-7). When…
Thinking about time in terms of music also helps us to appreciate its unity and inner relations. Henri Bergson observes our cultural habit of dividing time into discrete moments, and conceiving of these as if akin to objects in a spatial succession. [1] Against such a notion, Bergson argues for…
As we attend to these and other aspects of music’s temporality, Begbie suggests, we will find means by which to resist some of our habitual modern ways of conceptualizing time, most especially our tendency to conceive of time as if it were a homogeneous set of technologically quantifiable units laid…
The Hidden Dimension In many fields of scientific study, the apparent complications and contradictions are dispelled once the internal logic is perceived. Biblical hermeneutics is no different, since the author of Creation is the Author of the Word. The Bible’s literary labyrinth radiates organically from an algorithm so simple it…
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Among the German writers that Liebersohn ( The Return of the Gift ) discusses, Karl Bucher stands out as a crucial figure. Like other German economists, Bucher objected to what he saw as abstract British economic theories, which attempted to universalize the historically specific British experience. Beyond other theorists, and…
In his fascinating intellectual history of nineteenth and twentieth-century theories about gifts ( The Return of the Gift ), Harry Liebersohn discusses the theories of nineteen-century German economists who attempted to historicize economics. Friedrich List’s advocacy of rapid German modernization was partly shaped by his experience of the United States.…
Louis Markos packs an awful lot into the 130 pages of his new Literature: A Student’s Guide (Reclaiming the Christian Intellectual Tradition) . The book is an introduction to poetry, with a chapter on metrics and rhyme and another on poetic tropes and imagery. Halfway through, it turns into a…
In his Guilt and Gratitude: A Study of the Origins of Contemporary Conscience (Contributions in Philosophy) (pp. 37-8) , Joseph Amato follows Karl Polanyi in noting how the introduction of markets, contract, cash, corporations “radically transformed traditional man’s fundamental conception of giving and taking.” Adjusting to this new order left…
In the second book of De Specialibus Legibus Philo writes about the feast of trumpets: “Immediately after comes the festival of the sacred moon; in which it is the custom to play the trumpet in the temple at the same moment that the sacrifices are offered. From which practice this…
John Paul II ( Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology Of The Body , p. 168-9 ) notes that parents and children have a natural fleshly unity with one another. In marriage, by contrast, the one-flesh relationship is chosen: This “reciprocal choice . . . establishes the conjugal…
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