In an essay on Tennyson, John Stuart Mill insists that great poets must be great thinkers: “Every great poet, every poet who has extensively or permanently influenced mankind, has been a great thinker;—has had a philosophy, though perhaps he did not call it by that name;—has had . . . . Continue Reading »
Zephaniah 3’s description of God exalting over Israel as a husband over his bride has created some difficulties for interpreters. According to on Balserak ( Divinity Compromised: A Study of Divine Accommodation in the Thought of John Calvin ), Conrad Pellican and Bucer argue that since . . . . Continue Reading »
Stephen Dempster ends his 2003 Dominion and Dynasty: A Biblical Theology of the Hebrew Bible with this sharp summary of the “hour-glass” logic of typology: “Typological features emerge naturally when the biblical text is understood as a Text. This is particularly clear for the . . . . Continue Reading »
Is God the God of Abraham? It seems impossible: How could “of Abraham” be a description of God if Abraham’s existence is contingent (as it certainly is)? Should we then say that God is not essentially the God of Abraham but only voluntarily so? That solution doesn’t satisfy . . . . Continue Reading »
Harrison ( ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment , 12-13) argues that the Platonic revival of the Renaissance was one of the key sources for the modern notion of “religion.” The point is clearest in Ficino: “In De Christiana Religione (1474), he . . . . Continue Reading »
Peter Harrison argues in his ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (9) that the Reformation contributed massively to the development of a new notion of “religion,” especially in the ways Protestants and Catholics redesigned arguments formerly used against . . . . Continue Reading »
Pastor Ralph Smith examines the food laws of Deuteronomy 14 in the light of the gospel at the Trinity House site. . . . . Continue Reading »
Lobster, writes James Surowiecki in The New Yorker , was not always a luxury item. On the contrary: “In Colonial New England, it was a low-class food, in part because it was so abundant: servants, as a condition of their employment, insisted on not being fed lobster more than three times a . . . . Continue Reading »
In the course of a TNR meditation on the enduring popularity of Alfred Hitchcock, David Thomson comments on Hitchcock’s fascinations: “he loved Mount Rushmore in the moonlight, and a semi-desert prairie with crops where no crops would grow, and all those staircases on which ordeals are . . . . Continue Reading »
Americans think of ourselves as entrepreneurs, innovators, and self-starters. That description fits plenty of American businessmen, but in the world we inhabit many technological advances that fuel mega-sized companies started in government programs. John Judis makes this point concisely in a . . . . Continue Reading »
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