Stephen Geller opens an essay on blood in “P” by stating that he is treating the Pentateuch as a literary unit.What the “priestly editor” produced, he argue is not “patchwork aggregate signifying nothing” but “a work meaningful in the whole, a tapestry . . . . Continue Reading »
The whole of Marcia Angell’s review of Alison Wolf’s The XX Factor is worth careful reading. It’s a detailed sketch of the lives of upper-middle-class working women and the effect their entrance into the workplace has had on marriage and family.Some of those effects are . . . . Continue Reading »
Zizek’s more violent apocalypticism avoids these difficulties of the milder but less coherent apocalyptic of Alain Badiou. It is the commitment and passion inherent in apocalyptic that attracts Zizek. The deconstructive theology of John Caputo destroys the very foundations of Christianity . . . . Continue Reading »
Timothy Snyder reports that gay marriage got implicated in the Ukrainian uprising and the Russian response.Putin’s appeal to Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych included, as everyone knows, financial incentives. It also included warnings about the effect of entering the . . . . Continue Reading »
Oedipus was the ideal hero for classical Athens, a solver of riddles intent on discovering secrets. And the Sphinx was the perfect monstrous adversary. It’s no surprise that the story became one of the most famous myths of the ancient and modern worlds.In her recent brief . . . . Continue Reading »
Suppose you’re walking to church to worship God. Along the way, your motive changes from piety to vainglory. You continue walking to church, but now you’re walking to church to be seen by others to be walking to church.What happened to the action of walking to church when your will . . . . Continue Reading »
Are Christians obsessed with sex? Yes we are, and for good . . . . Continue Reading »
Though “word and sentence are interdependent,” argues David Braine (Language and Human Understanding, 2), yet “neither is definable in terms of the other.”This is most often acknowledged from one direction: An infinite number of sentences can be constructed from the finite . . . . Continue Reading »
In a 2005 article in Atike Kunst, Gunnel Ekroth examines vase paintings to explore the role blood played in Greek sacrificial rites. One main aim is to support his thesis that Greek reserved sacrificial blood in order to consume it, and he defense this view by examining when blood is and when it is . . . . Continue Reading »
Leviticus contains only two narratives (chs. 10, 24), and its structure is dictated by speeches from Yahweh to Moses, who delivers them to Israel.Yet, in a rough and broad way, it’s possible to see a narrative shape to the book, particularly if we view it as a continuation of the book of . . . . Continue Reading »
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