The December 20 edition of the NYRB has some arresting photos of bronze statues in a London Royal Academy exhibit, made all the more impressive by the reviewer Andrew Butterfield’s description of the process of bronze sculpture: “Bronze is very different from most materials of . . . . Continue Reading »
Poor Camille Paglia. She’s worked herself into a froth. Writing in The Hollywood Reporter , she complains s(n)eeringly that the latest crop of women stars have betrayed feminism. With Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, and their crowd of new power women, we’re back “to the demure . . . . Continue Reading »
“None of our Western [economic] distinctions was completely absent in antiquity,” writes Sitta van Reden near the end of her Exchange in Ancient Greece (218). Yet, because of a different configuration of society the distinctions we take for granted were not so ingrained: “Rigid . . . . Continue Reading »
Morwenna Ludlow ( Gregory of Nyssa, Ancient and (Post)modern , 41-2) has some critical things to say about Robert Jenson’s use of Gregory of Nyssa, but she thinks he gets some things right: “Jenson is notable among systematic theologians in distinguishing clearly between the persons (or . . . . Continue Reading »
For I will consider my cat Alice. (Not my cat; my daughter’s, though I pay her keep.) Alice is a servant of the living God duly and daily serving him. Mostly she serves by pouncing on my bed at the first glance of the glory of God in the East, wreaths her body with elegant quickness until she . . . . Continue Reading »
God is the Father of precipitation, Job says (Job 38:25-30). Rain is filial, the Father’s nourishing gift to the world. The same imagery appears elsewhere. The righteous king is “like rain upon the mown grass” (Psalm 72:6), and the king’s “favor is like a cloud with . . . . Continue Reading »
In Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ (19), TF Torrance warns about the inevitably psychologizing and anthropologization that occurs when “the witness of the evangelists and the other New Testament authors reposes ultimately upon Jesus’ own self-consciousness.” In the . . . . Continue Reading »
Barth cites this passage from the Epistle to Diognetus to emphasize the gentleness of God in His self-revelation in the Son. God sent His very son: “He did not, as one might have imagined, send to men any servant, or angel, or ruler, or any one of those who bear sway over earthly things, or . . . . Continue Reading »
For Barth ( Church Dogmatics The Doctrine of the Word of God, Volume 1, Part 2: The Revelation of God; Holy Scripture: The Proclamation of the Church , 34), the incarnation reveals that God is free for us, pro nobis . But Trinitarian theology is the affirmation that is freedom is grounded in the . . . . Continue Reading »
Peter Leithart’s new project is highly exciting and deserves the widest support. As one of the leading theologians of our times, Leithart has uniquely managed to combine fresh Biblical and historical scholarship with cultural engagement at every level from high to popular. He has also shown . . . . Continue Reading »