Toward the end of his “Short Treatise on the Lord’s Supper” (sections 57-60), Calvin summarizes the history of Protestant disputes concerning the Supper. He focuses attention on the debate between Luther and Zwingli that culminated at Marburg (1529), and points to the failures on both sides that led to the impasse. Calvin had the advantage of looking back to these dispute, which enabled him to assess the pluses and minuses calmly. He provides an illuminating near-participant perspective on this early Protestant… Read more

Charles Marohn, Jr. (Thoughts on Building Strong Towns, 1) calls suburbanization a “grand experiment” in urban planning and growth. His less neutral description is that it’s a “Ponzi scheme.” Since World War II, suburbanization has occurred in several phases. First, “transfer payments” from state and federal government funded “local growth initiatives such as new roads, sewers, industrial parks and community facilities.” Then there was spending on transportation, especially the interstate highway system. The third phase was funded by debt, mostly… Read more

As it turns out, Jonah is not very successful at flight. He goes down, down, down, but as he descends he continues to witness as a prophet. When the Lord throws a storm on the sea, the sailors wake Jonah to ask him to call on his god for help. When the lots indicate that Jonah is the reason for the storm, he confesses that he serves the God of heaven who made sea and land (1:9). It’s an alarming confession:… Read more

Jonah’s life literally goes downhill when he tries to flee from Yahweh, when he refuses to be a light to the Assyrians. Read more

Mark Lilla devotes a chapter of The Shipwrecked Mind to an exposition of the thought of Franz Rosenzweig, setting him in the context of the 20th-century revolt against Hegel. It was, on the one hand, a revolt against 19th-century Hegelian conceptions of history: “Throughout the nineteenth century, Hegel had been understood, correctly or not, as having discovered a rational process in world history that would culminate in the modern bureaucratic state, bourgeois civil society, a Protestant civil religion, a capitalist… Read more

At various points, 2 Chronicles indicates the month during which some event occurred. The dates tie the events to moments in Israel’s liturgical calendar. 2 Chronicles 5:3 is explicit. Solomon assembles “all the men of Israel” to Jerusalem “at the feast, that is the seventh month.” At the end of the temple dedication, on the twenty-third day of the seventh month, Solomon sent everyone back home (7:10). We’ll return to the question of which seventh-month feast is in view. Asa’s… Read more

The next time you have a space 15 minutes, treat yourself to the Wingfeather Saga short film on Youtube. It’s a quarter hour of sheer delight. One of the most arresting things about the segment is the way it provides rich, mysterious backgrounds for the characters. The characters live in something like the early-modern Western world, but there are unusual things in this world.Three children go into a city where the guards are all poisonous lizards. Dragons dance at sunset in the sea,… Read more

Study of the sacramental in early modern English poetry has become a cottage industry in literary scholarship. Kimberley Johnson isn’t satisfied with the direction this scholarship has taken, and in her Made Flesh, she offers a corrective. Much of the scholarship has focused on sacramental, especially Eucharistic, doctrine as it is expressed in lyric poetry. Scholars try to determine if the poet is Catholic, Anglo-Catholic, Reformed, Lutheran, Puritan, or something else. This isn’t poetics, though. It doesn’t describe the relationship… Read more

What is sacrifice for? Many ancient cultures thought that animal offers fed the gods. The situation is more ambiguous for ancient Greeks. As Charles Stocking points out in his Politics of Sacrifice in Early Greek Myth and Poetry, the only explicit evidence for the notion that sacrifice is food for gods comes from comedy (e.g., Aristophanes’s Birds, in which birds prevent sacrificial smoke from getting to the gods). In texts that claim to describe the origin of sacrifice (Hesiod’s Theogony;… Read more

In a TLS review of several recent books on China, Gavin Jacobson highlights the role of geography and history in the formation of contemporary Chinese politics. Geography first: “China is enclosed within 14,000 miles of land borders and a 9,000-mile sea edge. Twenty countries lie next to it, including peer powers, like Russia and India, and smaller, yet historically turbulent states such as North Korea.” China is boxed in on all sides. Then history: “In the 1920s . . …. Read more

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