Revenge, it has been said, is a meal best served cold. But what revenge also does is make the perpetrator’s heart grow cold, and ruthless. This novel is all about various forms of revenge, taken by women against men who have abused women and sold them as chattel into prostitution, in other words, human trafficking, and revenge taken against women who enabled such wickedness, or got in the way the fury of the revenge taker. Mother Midnight is the assumed... Read more
Paul Doherty is a masterful writer of medieval historical fiction. He deals in this and other novels with the early 14th century, and with the two King Edwards. This one is set in 1312 when King Edward II rules, sort of. It would be better to say that chaos rules. Edward is losing a war on the border against the Scots, and meanwhile, while the king’s away….. the underlings do their bidding. This novel centers on the actual famous theft... Read more
Richard Macksey was a real professor at a brick and mortar University, a good one– John Hopkins. He of course had access to their library and other vast libraries in the Baltimore and D.C. area. But this didn’t stop him from having an excellent personal library of over 50,000 books, not to mention a portrait of Da Vinci (I think). See the photo above. While I am not a techniphobe, and have no issues with people reading books on Kindle,... Read more
It rarely if ever happens that a movie gets an 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but the recent star-studded spoof, the Lost City has gotten it. The critics are falling all over themselves to praise this movie, and rightly so. If you are old enough to remember movies from the 80s this one is a take off on Romancing the Stone and Jewel of the Nile and just as enjoyable. Filmed in the Dominican Republic complete with bugs, leeches, snakes,... Read more
Q. One of the more recent trends in the rhetorical analysis of the Pastoral is the point out that in all three documents we have incomplete syllogisms—i.e. enthymemes, and that one needs to fill in the missing premise to understand the flow of the argument. Otherwise, it appears to be a grab bag of ethical enjoinders that are unconnected, according to some. Are you familiar with this argument, and if so, what do you think? A. Yes, I have... Read more
Q. I am a bit surprised, since you do devote a good lengthy chapter to Colossians and Ephesians that you don’t mention or deal with the arguments of Jeal, Lincoln and others that we are dealing with Asiatic style rhetoric here, which is not in evidence in the earlier Paulines. Have you an opinion about the difference in rhetorical style in those letters? A. I cited Jeal in several instances in my chapter on Ephesians. For my purposes, it was... Read more
Q. I was very pleased to see your exegesis of Rom. 7.7-25, a Christian description of a pre-Christian condition. Luther’s mistaken interpretation of that passage has done a lot of damage to Christians since the Reformation. At one point I was the cantor in a Lutheran church in Ashland Ohio, and I had to lead the saying of the Lutheran creed. For the life of me, I couldn’t say the words in the Lutheran confession, ‘we are still in the... Read more
Q. Let’s talk about Rom. 6 for a minute. It seems clear Paul is talking about water baptism there, which he says is an image of being immersed or plunged into Christ’s death and being buried with Christ. In short it is an image of the death of the old person. After that one rises to newness of life, set free from the bondage to sin. But what was Paul’s actual theology of baptism? I ask this question because I... Read more
Q. Reading through your treatment of Romans I note your point about ‘the righteousness of God’ referring to an attribute of God (p. 191). Exactly right. And certainly one of the points of Romans is that God doesn’t want his people to simply have right-standing with him, he wants them to be actually like him in character. In other words, Romans is not just about justification, it’s also about moral transformation through ‘the obedience of faith’. I think you would... Read more
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In