In a recent New Yorker piece on “Omission,” John McPhee puts in a word for concise writing. Inevitably, he quotes Hemingway: “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it... Read more
In a recent Theopolis lecture, James Jordan pointed to the symmetry between the beginning and end of the Mosaic era. As soon as the tabernacle is set up, Aaron’s two sons, Nadab and Abihu, offer foreign fire before the Lord and are killed. At the end of the Mosaic era, two priestly sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, are killed in the battle of Aphek. The Mosaic era begins with the death of two priestly sons, and ends with the... Read more
In a 2003 essay on Terrence Malick’s film, Days of Heaven, Hubert Cohen traces the Edenic motifs in Malick’s various films. At the beginning of The Thin Red Line, “Private Witt (Jim Caviezel) . . . is AWOL and living in a Melanesian community that he stubbornly insists is edenic,” but later “after he has experienced the horrors of combat, Witt revisits his paradise and sees that it is not free of the ills of human society and nature. He... Read more
Many scholars have pointed to the fact that the tabernacle is an architectural representation of Mount Sinai. The tabernacle is divided into three zones – court, holy place, most holy place – with different degrees of access; Sinai was organized the same way. The altar of ascensions in the courtyard was itself a mini-Sinai: Topped with fiery smoke, the altar resembled the smoking mountain, and the warning against touching the altar replicated the warning about touching Sinai. If this is... Read more
The Federal District court in the Kim Davis case concluded that requiring her to sign same-sex marriage licenses didn’t violate her free exercise of religion. She still could do all those quaint things that religious people do: “Davis remains free to practice her Apostolic Christian beliefs. She may continue to attend church twice a week, participate in Bible Study and minister to female inmates at the Rowan County Jail. She is even free to believe that marriage is a union... Read more
Josh Timmermann suggests that Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder takes its cues not from love stories but from love songs – one in particular, the Song of Songs: “Its narrative logic is specifically poetic. Its structure is built carefully upon a cadence of clear, beautiful rhymes and faint yet significant echoes; its entrances and exits, its tender highs and lows of romantic and spiritual feeling, are as perfectly timed and breathlessly sustained as the lovers’ back-and-forth in the Song of Songs. The mood... Read more
From both left and right, critics of Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis have criticized her as a law-breaker. Supporters of same-sex marriage say that her religious scruples don’t give her the right to pick and choose what responsibilities she’ll fulfill. Critics from the right have said her stance is a threat to law-and-order. Eugene Volokh shows in the Washington Post that the issue is more complicated, more complicated legally. After all, religious scruples are often accommodated in the workplace. In fact,... Read more
In a forthcoming book on The Inequality Trap, William Watson argues that the contemporary obsession with inequality is both an error and a trap. An error because “inequality, unlike poverty, is not the problem it is so widely presumed to be. Inequality can be good, it can be bad, and it can be neither good nor bad but benign.” While we may need ways of addressing various kinds of inequality, “we do not need, and it would be a mistake to... Read more
Lesslie Newbigin (Reunion of the Church, 129-131) explains that the Church of South India (CSI) statement regarding Scripture “excludes the possibility of treating the Scriptures merely as the earliest expression of the continuous faith of the Church, and treats the faith of the Church as a response, continuously confirmed in its experience by the Holy Spirit, to the revelation of God’s saving acts which the Scriptures record” (129). The CSI statement refers to “the faith which the Church has ever... Read more
At the beginning of Exodus, Pharaoh is spooked by Israel’s teeming growth. To keep them in check, he instructs the midwives to kill all Hebrew boys and spare the girls (Exodus 1:16). The girls will presumably be raised as Egyptians, become Egyptian wives and mothers, and Israel will be neutralized by being incorporated into Egypt. Like the original serpent in Eden, Pharaoh, the serpent of the Nile and the serpent of Goshen, tries to seize the bride for himself. This... Read more
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