Diane Thompson concludes her essay in Dostoevsky and the Christian Tradition with this superb description of the place of God’s Word in the words of Dostoevsky’s novels, and his characters:“Dostoevsky’s feeling for the dynamic aspect of the Logos was exceptionally . . . . Continue Reading »
Consciousness enters the world and the stones remain stones and the sun the sun. Still existence becomes completely different when consciousness arises, Bakhtin argues in Speech Genres. This happens become the coming of consciousness is the coming of “the witness and the judge” . . . . Continue Reading »
Nabokov didn’t much like Dostoevsky. What interests him in literature is “enduring art and individual genius,” and from this viewpoint Dostoevsky is mediocre: “with flashes of excellent humor, but, alas, with wastelands of literary platitudes in between” (Lectures on . . . . Continue Reading »
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 . . . . Continue Reading »
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 . . . . Continue Reading »
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 . . . . Continue Reading »
Jesus has the key of David (Revelation 3:7), which allows him to open and shut. The statement is chiastic:A. who opensB. and no one shutsB’. and shutsA’. and no one opens.The sentence’s structure mimics the sentence’s content: It speaks of “opening” at the . . . . Continue Reading »
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 - . . . . Continue Reading »
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), . . . . Continue Reading »
Judaism and Christianity are often contrasted as an opposition between “ritualistic” and “nonritualistic” systems. Howard Eilberg-Schwartz (The Savage in Judaism, 140) argues that this is a mistake. The real difference is a difference of “root metaphor.”This is . . . . Continue Reading »
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