Kingsmill calls attention to the common imagery used by the Song of Songs and the overtly “wisdom” literature, especially Proverbs. She makes a good case. But the difference between the Song and the other wisdom literature is notable. Proverbs 8:7 says, “My . . . . Continue Reading »
Jenkins again: “in 782, the Indian Buddhist missionary Prajna arrived in the Chinese imperial capital of Chang’an, but was unable to translate the Sanskrit sutras he had brought with him into either Chinese or any other familiar tongue . . . . He duly consulted the bishop named Adam . . . . . . Continue Reading »
Islam took over areas once Christian, but Christianity left its mark on the conquerors. Jenkins writes: “No worthwhile history of Islam could omit the history of the Sufi orders, whose practices often recall the bygone world of the Christian monks. It was the Christian monastics . . . . Continue Reading »
Philip Jenkins writes, “we need to realize that such incidents of decline and disappearance [like the decline of Christianity he recounts in his book] are quite frequent, however little they are studied or discussed. Dechristianization is one of the least studied aspects of Christian . . . . Continue Reading »
Philip Jenkin’s earlier books turn the world upside down - south is up, north is down. His recent The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died does the same for eastern ad western Christianity. . . . . Continue Reading »
By his own admission, Rick Ostrander’s Why College Matters to God: A Student’s Introduction to The Christian College Experience contains little that is new, but it is a very deft introduction to the Christian view of things (organized around the time-honored creation-fall-redemption . . . . Continue Reading »
William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India explores the clash between modernization and tradition in contemporary India. Early on, he illustrates with several anecdotes from his travels: “Outside Jodhpur, I visited a shrine and pilgrimage centre that . . . . Continue Reading »
The apertures of our body are doorways that mediate between outside and inside. We normally think of them as intake points: Light enters our eyes and we see, molecules tickle the sensors in our noses and we smell, mouths and tongues are for tasting and eating. In the Song, the movement is . . . . Continue Reading »
Lexicons typically etymologize “Moriah” by linking it to the verb “see.” Abraham tells Isaac that Yahweh will “see (as in “see to”) the lamb for the offering on the mountains of Moriah (Genesis 22:8, 14). Moriah is where Yahweh provides a . . . . Continue Reading »
The Triune God is a God of peace. Father, Son, and Spirit live in eternal and undisruptible harmony with one another. But harmony is not the same as the sheer “peace” of stasis. We ought not, I think, figure the harmony of the Persons by analogy with the harmony of figures . . . . Continue Reading »
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