2 Kings 12:4: Then Jehoash said to the priests, All the money of the sacred things which is brought into the house of the Lord, in current money, both the money of each man’s assessment and all the money which any man’s heart prompts him to bring into the house, let the priests take it for themselves, each man from his acquaintance, and they shall repair the damages of the house wherever the damage may be found. As I mentioned... Read more
A short play I wrote for my children some years ago. Scene 1: Joash and Zechariah Commotion offstage, and then two boys come on, arguing and tussling over a stick. Joash: Give it back! Give it back! Zechariah: No, it’s mine. You took it from me. Joash: I didn’t. Yours was different. It had different bark on it. Mine had the golden bark. Give it back! ( Reaches for the stick ). Zechariah: ( Pushing Joash away ) No. This... Read more
Some thoughts inspired by Dale Ralph Davis’ commentary on 2 Kings 12. The opening verses of 2 Kings 12 are formulaic. We have heard these words before, again and again, ad nausea in the history of 1-2 Kings: In the such and such year of so and so King of Israel, so and so king of Judah began to reign. He reigned for so many years, and he was faithful or not, doing or not doing right in the sight... Read more
Joash was a faithful king, but his faithfulness was not complete. He remained faithful, the writer of Kings tells us, “all his days in which Jehoiada the priest instructed him.” The parallel in 2 Chronicles 24 is more explicit: “Joash did what was right in the sight of the LORD all the days of Jehoiada the priest.” We don’t know if Jehoiada somehow failed, or if Joash did, or both. But we know there was a failure. Joash was faithful... Read more
Some thoughts inspired by student papers on Mark 15: The most obvious Markan irony in chapter 15 is the fact that the Roman soldiers mock Jesus for being king of the Jews when He in fact is the king of the Jews. God has the last laugh; God is not mocked, even when He’s mocked. But there are more subtle ironies at work. (more…) Read more
Some thoughts inspired by student papers on Mark 15: The most obvious Markan irony in chapter 15 is the fact that the Roman soldiers mock Jesus for being king of the Jews when He in fact is the king of the Jews. God has the last laugh; God is not mocked, even when He’s mocked. But there are more subtle ironies at work. (more…) Read more
Featherstone: “one of the characteristics of postmodern art in the 1960s was its attack on institutionalized art: on the museums and galleries, the critical academic hierarchies of taste, and the consecration of works of art as clearly demarcated objects of display. This attack on autonomous, institutionalized art was itself not new . . . it occurred with the historical avant-garde of the 1920s with its rejection of Aestheticism. In this context it is interesting to note that in the 1960s... Read more
Charles Jencks lamented in his Language of Postmodern Architecture that the term had been used in ways opposite to his own usage: “When I first wrote the book in 1975 and 1976 the word and concept of Post-Modernism had only been used with any frequency in literary criticism. Most perturbing, as I later realized it had been used to mean ‘Ultra-Modern,’ referring to the extremist novels of William Burroughs and a philosophy of nihilism and anti-convention. While I was aware... Read more
Featherstone again: “Postmodernism effectively thrusts aesthetic questions toward the center of sociological theory: it offers aesthetic models and justifications for the reading and critique of texts (the pleasure of the text, intertextuality, writerly texts) and aesthetic models for life (the expressive aestheticization of life, art as the good of life).” Read more
Featherstone wisely notes the danger of “simply relabelling experiences as postmodern which were formerly granted little significance,” and laments that many definitions of postmodernism are too loose and vague to be useful. Yet, even if contemporary thinkers are simply re-packaging established patterns of social and cultural life, it is worth a sociologist’s time to ask why this is happening. In any case, Featherstone does think that there are changes taking place in contemporary culture that can plausibly be labeled as... Read more
Leithart
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