Mark W. Elliott’s Engaging Leviticus is a compendium of historical commentary on the book of Leviticus. Organized chapter-by-chapter, Elliott draws together patristic, medieval, and modern commentators, mostly Christian but including some Jewish commentators along the way.That . . . . Continue Reading »
Origen interpreted the instructions about leprosy (Leviticus 13-14) as an “anatomy of spiritual disease” (Elliott, Engaging Leviticus, 132):“There are six types of spiritual plague, which can be taken as three pairs of types - each pair composed of disease that is curable (in . . . . Continue Reading »
I want to talk about death. No, the flowers haven’t confused me. I’m aware that this is a wedding and not a funeral, but still: I intend to talk about death. What I want to talk about is real death. I’m not using the word metaphorically. I want to talk about the end of life on . . . . Continue Reading »
In his recent Our American: A Hispanic History of the United States, Felipe Fernández-Armesto attempts to re-orient the history of the US. As the Economist reviewer explains,“The book takes aim at the founding myths of America that run exclusively from east to west. Those myths . . . . Continue Reading »
Scott Mandelbrote reviews Jed Z. Buchwald and Mordechai Feingold’s Newton and the Origin of Civilization in the TLS, a study of Newton’s efforts to reconstruct the history of the ancient world and his use of historical astronomy to buttress his biblical chronology.Mandelbrote . . . . Continue Reading »
Oliver Ready offers an insightful analysis of Crime and Punishment in the latest TLS.As Ready says, the book’s title creates expectations about its contents: “A ready-made title, Crime and Punishment suggests a ready-made plot. A man will commit a crime. He will be caught. He . . . . Continue Reading »
A new zombie apocalypse game, DayZ, departs from conventional gaming by introducing permadeath, which is a lot like real death in that it is permanent:Evie Nagy reports, permadeath means “that players have only one life in the game and lose everything if they are killed—as well as a . . . . Continue Reading »
Rosaenstock-Huessy argues that the feast of All Souls is the source of Western liberty: “Liberty was promised to all souls, liberty, the great promise of Revolution, is first heard in the Occident at All Souls” (Out of Revolution, 510).The feast accomplishes this by inserting death and . . . . Continue Reading »
Balthasar, writes Gerald O’Hanlon (The Immutability of God in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar), thought it necessary to re-examine the tradition regarding immutability and impassibility because both needed to be “understood in the context of the liveliness of inner-trinitarian . . . . Continue Reading »
Religions, Milbank (Beyond Secular Order) argues, do not necessary aim for the ultimate. “Many human religions relate themselves, both theoretically and practically, to a cosmic level which they talce to be less than ultimate - often marked by a mythically narrated violent ‘brealc’ . . . . Continue Reading »
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