McDermott ( Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods: Christian Theology, Enlightenment Religion, and Non-Christian Faiths , 151) doesn’t exonerate orthodox Christianity from responsibility for modern anti-Semitism, but he points to the large role played by Deist attacks on the uniqueness of . . . . Continue Reading »
God waited to send His Son, but, Edwards argued, he did not wait to shine light to the Gentiles. According to Edwards, God’s actions throughout the Old Testament era were designed to catch the world’s attention, not just Israel’s. As McDermott ( Jonathan Edwards Confronts the . . . . Continue Reading »
In his Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods: Christian Theology, Enlightenment Religion, and Non-Christian Faiths , Gerald McDermott notes that Edwards saw “provocation to jealousy” as a recurring pattern of history: “God, he discovered, uses jealousy as a redemptive tool to . . . . Continue Reading »
Romulus’s use of a 10-month calendar has long been one of the puzzles of early Roman chronology and history. Why would he introduce such time-keeping. The polymathic Guillaume Postel had a theory: “Pretending that he wished to establish a beginning for the year in Mars’s honor, he . . . . Continue Reading »
Procreation, Aristotle said, is like building a house. The carpenter’s role in house-building helps us understand “how the male makes its contribution to generation.” The semen males emit in sexual generation “is not part of the fetation as it develops,” just as a . . . . Continue Reading »
The Reformation is often characterized as an assault on or at least a diminution of the sacraments. At the Trinity House site, I argue the opposing case: The Reformation recovered the sacraments . . . . . Continue Reading »
Throughout the seventeenth and eighteen centuries “purists” battled with “mixturists” about language. Purists believed that languages should be purged of foreign influence and, politically, that the people of a realm should speak a single language. Mixturists reveled in the . . . . Continue Reading »
The discovery of the Cologne Mani Codex at the University of Cologne in 1969 revealed as great deal about the early history of Manichaeism. According to John Reeve’s Heralds of That Good Realm: Syro-Mesopotamian Gnosis and Jewish Traditions (6), the discovery encouraged “a dawning . . . . Continue Reading »
Many have pointed to the early modern privatization of religion, with its corresponding interiorization. Guy Stroumsa ( A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason , 24-6 ) notices something else in the post-Reformation era: “To sum up the key characteristic of the . . . . Continue Reading »
The Jesuit Louis le Comte’s Nouveau memoires sur l’etat present de la Chine (1696) defended the losing Jesuit side in the “rites controversy” - the debate about whether Chinese converts were permitted to continue in ancestor worship and other traditional rites. His book was . . . . Continue Reading »
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