Writing on Joyce’s Ulysses just before the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday, Declan Kiberd notes the oddity of the ending: “the climax of Ulysses is a meeting between two men, the young poet Stephen Dedalus and the older ad-canvasser Leopold Bloom . . . . The meeting of Dedalus and Bloom is one of the oddest climaxes in the history of Modernism, since it violates the convention that there must be war between bohemian and bourgeois. Instead, the poet and businessman... Read more
Can there be a Creator-creature distinction without the Trinity? It would seem not. For a unitarian theology “distance” is introduced only with the world; for a unitarian god to be at a distance, there must be something to be at a distance FROM. But because “distance” is not of the essence of a unitarian God, unitarian theologies must either affirm an absolute unrelatedness between God and the world or an ultimate identity. Either distance is utterly distance, or distance can... Read more
Derrida believes the idea of a “gift” is contradictory. As David Hart summarizes, for Derrida, even if the gift is given with no expectation of tangible return, it still cannot be truly a gift, because the gift elicits recognition of the giver, and even the intention to give requires a recognition by the giver that he or she is a giver; the gift, given or intended, carries with it a credit of glory.” The only gift that truly qualifies as... Read more
Derrida believes the idea of a “gift” is contradictory. As David Hart summarizes, for Derrida, even if the gift is given with no expectation of tangible return, it still cannot be truly a gift, because the gift elicits recognition of the giver, and even the intention to give requires a recognition by the giver that he or she is a giver; the gift, given or intended, carries with it a credit of glory.” The only gift that truly qualifies as... Read more
Hart argues that the beauty of creation should not be seen as competing with the beauty of God; sensible things do not in themselves distract from God, but rather our corrupt desires reduces the things of the world to “inert property” alone draws the sensible world away from God. He goes on to say, “Of course, theology has suffered, historically, from a variety of etherealizing susceptibilities: the occasional dualistic tensions within a small portion of patristic metaphysics, or Zwingli’s spectral... Read more
Hart argues that the beauty of creation should not be seen as competing with the beauty of God; sensible things do not in themselves distract from God, but rather our corrupt desires reduces the things of the world to “inert property” alone draws the sensible world away from God. He goes on to say, “Of course, theology has suffered, historically, from a variety of etherealizing susceptibilities: the occasional dualistic tensions within a small portion of patristic metaphysics, or Zwingli’s spectral... Read more
OK, I can’t stop writing down remarks from Hart, so here’s another: Nicolas of Cusa remarks that eternal wisdom is tasted in everything savored, eternal pleasure felt in all things pleasurable, eternal beauty beheld in all that is beautiful, and eternal desire experienced in everything desired (Idiota de sapientia 1); he even claims that a man who sees a beautiful woman, and is agitated by the sight of her, gives glory thus to God and admires God’s infinite beauty (Excitationes... Read more
Here are some more excerpts from David Bentley Hart’s remarkable Beauty of the Infinite . “The Bible . . . depicts creation at once as a kind of deliberative invention (‘Let us make . . . ’) and, consequently, as a kind of play, a kind of artistry for the sake of artistry. This is expressed with exquisite delicacy by the figure of Wisdom in the book of Proverbs, at play like a small child before the eyes of God,... Read more
Mark Biddle of the Baptist Theological Seminary in Richmond examines some of the intertextual connections between 1 Sam 25 and the Jacob narratives in Genesis ( JBL 121/4 [2002]). He discovers analogies between Nabal and Laban, Saul and Laban, and of course Nabal and Saul. Abigail is comparable to Rebekah and, intriguingly, Jacob. The latter parallel is particularly worth noting: Jacob and Abigail both send servants ahead to meet a threatening force (Gen 32:17; 1 Sam 25:19), and the servants... Read more
Timothy Wengert’s article in the Lutherjahrbuch 66 (1999) offers an analysis of the controverted relationship between Luther and Melanchthon. Wengert puts aside psychological assessments of the relationship, and does not focus on theological similarities and differences, which might have the effect of reducing the two men to their ideas. Instead, he examines their daily interaction in Wittenberg, and how they responded to various crises and confontations. Several points are particularly noteworthy: 1) Wengert stresses more than once that neither Luther... Read more
Leithart
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