“I believe strictly in the Monroe Doctrine, in our Constitution, and in the laws of God,” said Mary Baker Eddy in 1923, a century after Monroe propose his doctrine. It’s an interesting list, in an interesting order. One of the virtues of Jay Sexton’s The Monroe Doctrine: . . . . Continue Reading »
William Appleman Williams ( Empire As A Way of Life: An Essay on the Causes and Character of America’s Present Predicament Along with a Few Thoughts about an Alternative ) notes the tradition from mercantile to laissez-faire policies in the Jacksonian era: “We are dealing with the . . . . Continue Reading »
Bucking Montesquieu and most other theorists of republicanism, Madison argued that the American system required a large rather than a small territory to operate effectively: “Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a . . . . Continue Reading »
The message to the church at Sardis (Revelation 3:1-6) is framed by several word repetitions. The word “name” appears in v 1, and three times in verses 4-5 (trans. once as “people” in the NASB). Jesus says at the outset that the people of Sardis have a “name” for . . . . Continue Reading »
In The Gift , Nabokov recounts this legend about Chernyshevsky’s What To Do? (Or, What Is To Be Done? ). Chernyshevsky wrote the novel in prison and gave proofs of each section to his friend Nekrasov. But “Nekrasov, on his way home (corner of Liteynaya and Basseynaya streets) in a . . . . Continue Reading »
Verhey has a nice discussion of the nature/supernatural distinction that locates the difference in eschatology. He points out, for starters, that “the regularities of the world we name as ‘natural laws” are not regularities of a self-contained machine but rather then ways God . . . . Continue Reading »
Ted Peters points out the duplicity of genetic determinism: “The growing myth of genetic determinism blows first in one direction: if we are programmed totally by our DAN< then what we think is human freedom is in fact a delusion. Then the myth blows the opposite way: if we can apply our . . . . Continue Reading »
In his discussion of the “Baconian project” in his recent Nature and Altering It , Allen Verhey makes the common-sensical, but often ignored, observation that mastery of nature doesn’t necessarily mean improvement: “Knowledge, in Bacon’s view, is power over nature, and . . . . Continue Reading »
If there was any doubt before, it has become very clear in recent scholarship that Greek mythology is indebted to Ancient Near Eastern predecessors. The most massively detailed treatment of this point in recent years is ML West’s The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry . . . . Continue Reading »
Philippians 3:7-8: Whatever things were gain to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ. More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish . . . . Continue Reading »
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