1 Peter 2:24-25: He Himself bore our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness—by whose stripes you were healed. For you were like sheep going astray, but have now returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls. As we heard in the sermon this morning, Jesus fulfills Isaiah’s prophecy of the Suffering Servant, who suffered in silence, who did not revile, who committed no sin and in whose... Read more
On stage and in movies, revenge stories often end in bloodshed. To avenge herself on her ex-husband Jason for taking another wife, Medea kills her own children. Orestes kills his mother because she murdered his father and her husband, and Hamlet’s attack on his uncle-father Claudius engulfs the entire royal family of Denmark. In Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies, a female assassin takes spectacular revenge against her ex-lover. Theatrical vengeance can be breathtaking, but in life revenge is more often... Read more
Steven Levitt, an economist at the University of Chicago, argues that various factors have contributed to the surprising decline in crime rates during and since the 1990s, but among these is the legalization of abortion. According to the reviewer in TNR, “After abortion was legalized, a number of likely criminals were not allowed to be born in teh 1970s, and as a result the crime rate went down twenty years later. Levitt’s striking conclusion is that legalized abortion played a... Read more
S.S. Bartchy offers this important summary of the differences between ancient and American slavery: “Central features that distinguish 1st century slavery from that later practiced in the New World are the following: racial factors played no role; education was greatly encouraged (some slaves were better educated than their owners) and enhanced a slave’s value [so, the Jeeves-and-Wooster conventions of Plautus were not far off the mark – PJL]; many slaves carried out sensitive and highly responsible social functions; slaves could... Read more
Marion points to Husserl’s suggestion that essence and existence are not really different principles but rather “two modes of being in two modes of self-givenness.” This is attractive, and perhaps not incompatible with the Thomistic tradition that sees the distinction of essence/existence as a key feature of created being – though for a Thomist the “self-givenness” of phenomena is surely not the whole story. Read more
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (online) provides this helpful summary of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of phenomenological reduction: “The transformation of the object of perception into the thought of the object of perception, that is to say, the attempt to reconstitute the world in immanence, is pursued not only by analytic reflection; it is also accomplished by the phenomenological reduction, at least as it is proposed by Husserl in Volume One of the Ideas Pertaining to Pure Phenomenology (Kluwer Publishers, The Netherlands,... Read more
Gordon Smith quotes this from Cyril of Jerusalem: “You must not suppose that this is the usual kind of kiss which ordinary friends exchange when they meet in the street. This kiss is different. By it souls are united with one another and receive a pledge of the mutual forgiveness of all wrong. So then, a kiss is a sign of the union of souls and of hte expulsion of all remembrance of wrong . . . . So the... Read more
Gordon Smith’s A Holy Meal , just out from Baker, is the latest (to my knowledge) in a small stream of books on sacramental theology coming from Reformed and evangelical presses. It’s a heartening sign. Smith’s book examines the Eucharist as remembrance, communion, forgiveness, covenant-renewal, nourishment, anticipation, and thanksgiving, and ends with a pneumatological account of the real presence. He hits some key points: the evangelical reduction of the Supper to a mental act, the corporate reality of the church,... Read more
In Housekeeping , Marilynne Robinson observes through he narrator Ruth that absence is actually a more intense form of presence. As long as friends and family are physically empirically here, they are localized and circumscribed. Absent, memory finds them in every nook and cranny – a dead and beloved wife is always in the kitchen and the bedroom and curling up in her favorite chair all at once and all the time. But of course Robinson says it better: “Sylvie... Read more
Jean-Luc Marion points out that “method” comes from the Greek meta-hodos, and explains why phenomenology is not methodological: “The method does not run ahead of the phenomenon, by fore -seeing it, pre -dicting it, and pro -ducing it, in order to await it from the outset at the end of the path ( meta-hodos ) onto which it has just barely set forth.” Conversely, philosophy influenced by Descartes is governed by method, which means that all its conclusions were determined... Read more
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