Wax and Wane and Wax

Mead responds to the notion that civilizations and empires inevitably decline with this: Arguments about inevitable decline, articulated by Spengler and Toynbee, “looked more probable in the early and middle years of the twentieth century than they do today. Consider the idea that all . . . . Continue Reading »

Maritime Order

One of Mead’s main themes is that Anglo-American strategy during the past several centuries has focused on the development of maritime order. In this perspective, the world is single, but divided into different theaters: “The theaters are all linked by the sea, and whoever controls the . . . . Continue Reading »

Helping the Weak

Walter Russell Mead acknowledges in God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World (Vintage) that balance of power politics is a matter of letting rivals busy their giddy minds with foreign quarrels. Britain was happy to leave Continental fights to Continentals: “Let . . . . Continue Reading »

Proto-Homers

Gordon summarizes epics that previewed the Homeric epics in quite direct ways. The “Ugaritic Legend of Kret is of Cretan derivation as the name of the hero indicates. Like the Iliad, the story concerns a war waged so that a king might regain his rightful wife who is being withheld from him, . . . . Continue Reading »

Epic, Nation, Cosmos

In his dense 1967 monograph on Homer and the Bible , Cyrus Gordon argued that the Iliad was written not for the sake of art only but to inspire the imagination of a Greek nation: “it does not divide Greek from Greek. The Trojans and their allies are treated with as much decorum and honor as . . . . Continue Reading »

Pity the Radical

Pity the radical. For every radical, there’s always someone more radical still, someone who plays “more radical than thou” with greater skill. Recent New Testament scholarship has highlighted the “counter-imperial” import of the gospel. In some ways, this is a healthy . . . . Continue Reading »

Womb of the World

The church is the incubator of the new creation. It is the womb of a new world, where the new creation gestates. But it can also be an incubator of monsters and witches. That’s the message of the letters to the churches. As Austin Farrer and others point out, the letters anticipate later . . . . Continue Reading »

Hot and Cold

James Jordan notes the connection between Jesus’ warning to the church at Laodicea and Yahweh’s promise to Noah after the flood. Jesus warns the church that is “neither hot nor cold” that they will be spewed from His mouth (Revelation 3:15-16). In Genesis 8, Yahweh promises . . . . Continue Reading »