In his The Mind of Egypt: History and Meaning in the Time of the Pharaohs , Jan Assmann notes the two purposes of rituals that mimicked “cosmic life and the cyclical recurrence of its natural phenomenon: day and night, summer and winter, the motions of the stars, the inundations of the Nile, . . . . Continue Reading »
We all realize that seeing the future requires prophetic inspiration. But we think that the past will be accessible to us if we can accumulate sufficient evidence. Some of the ancients knew better. Josephus wrote that “the prophets alone had this privilege [writing history], . . . . Continue Reading »
Jean Baudrillard ( America ) observed that the mystery of California, its mystique and myth, are rooted in its desert setting: “The mythical power of California consists in this mixture of extreme disconnection and vertiginous mobility captured in the setting, the hyperreal scenario of . . . . Continue Reading »
One of the themes of Jenkins’s The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died is that Christianization is reversible: Churches die. How to account for it? Jenkins He cites on Payne Smith, a . . . . Continue Reading »
Friedman notes that the end of major wars frequently evokes an unwarranted euphoria. Every war is considered not only a war to end wars, but a war that has ended war: After every major war - what we might call systemic war in which the entire international system convulsed - there was a . . . . Continue Reading »
A lot has happened since George Friedman published his America’s Secret War: Inside the Hidden Worldwide Struggle Between America and Its Enemies in 2003 (with a paperback edition in 2005). Still, Friedman’s book is the most satisfying treatment of recent American history that . . . . Continue Reading »
Many of the debates in the Reformed world these days have a sizable church-historical, historical-theological component. What was the Reformation about? How much was it in continuity with the patristic and medieval past? To what extent did Protestant Orthodoxy or American . . . . Continue Reading »
In his best-selling WAR , Vanity Fair ‘s Sebastian Junger explains how war envelops the soldiers who make it. Some representative quotations: “Almost none of the things that make life feel worth living back home are present at Restrepo, so the entire range of a young man’s . . . . Continue Reading »
As William Cavanaugh details ( The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict ), the concept of religion is an invention of the late medieval and early modern West. In the theory of religion as developed by Deists and Freethinkers, there was an original, . . . . Continue Reading »
As Jenkins recounts it, some Christians in the Islamic Middle East chose a path of separation, the “creation of a protected Christian reservation.” that was tried with the creation of Lebanon after World War I, but that experiment ended in civil war and a greatly reduced Christian . . . . Continue Reading »
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