Peter J. Leithart

In worship and prayer, how do we go to God?  Groveling, wormy, filled with anxiety and fear?  As abject sinners?  As those who are dead? That is not how Paul tells us to go.  We are to present ourselves not as those who are dead, but as “those alive from the dead” . . . . Continue Reading »

In the centuries since the Reformation, the phrase “priesthood of all believers” has become a Protestant slogan.  For the Reformers, the idea was that every Christian, by virtue of baptism and faith, has the same status before God.  Every member of the body of Christ serves . . . . Continue Reading »

Elizabeth Watson reads Hamlet through the lens of Eamon Duffy’s classic “stripping of the altars” thesis.  In the play, altars are replaced by tables, the arras, the bed, and the stage spectacle takes the place of Catholic liturgical spectacle: “it is not the . . . . Continue Reading »

By day, Mike Bull is a graphic designer in the Blue Mountains outside of Sidney, Australia.  But his real passion is biblical theology, and he has produced a primer on biblical theology and biblical structure entitled Bible Matrix: An Introduction to the DNA of the Scriptures , available on . . . . Continue Reading »

Micah 3 appears to be a distinct unit of the prophecy (but see below).  It begins with “And I said,” and chapter 4 begins with a disjunctive “it will come about in the last days” (4:1). Within chapter 3, there is an obvious inclusio between verses 1 and 9.  Both . . . . Continue Reading »

In 1881, Edward Payson Vining wrote an innovative book that promised to unravel The Mystery of Hamlet .  When Vining had weighed all the evidence, he came to the only reasonable conclusion: Hamlet was a woman. Not, mind you, that Shakespeare conceived of a female prince: “It is not even . . . . Continue Reading »

When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern play questions with Hamlet in Tom Stoppard’s inversion of Hamlet , Rosencrantz says that the score was “Twenty-seven-three.” “He murdered us,” he adds, and then says it again for good measure. As Marjorie Garber notes in her  . . . . Continue Reading »

Spirit, Hegel said, works inwardly, ever forward, until “grown strong in itself it bursts asunder the crust of earth which divided it from the sun . . . so that the earth crumbles away.”  Apparently addressing relentless Geist , Hegel quotes Hamlet to his father’s ghost: . . . . Continue Reading »

De Grazia still, summarizing Lacan’s claim that Hamlet is about mourning: “‘I know of no commentator who has ever taken the trouble to make this remark . . . from one end of Hamle t to the other, all anyone talks about is mourning.’  It is no coincidence that . . . . Continue Reading »

The OED indicates that the first known use of the word “psychological” is from 1812, but de Grazia says that “Coleridge had been using the term in his lectures since 1800.”  He used it mainly to describe Shakespeare’s ability to characterize “habits of . . . . Continue Reading »