“You who were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ,” Paul tells the Gentile Ephesians (2:13). Jesus’ blood is the sacrificial blood that makes a way of approach to God. “He Himself is our peace, who made both one and broke down the dividing wall by abolishing in His flesh the enmity,” Paul adds (2:14-15). By His death in the flesh, Jesus removes the ordinances and enmity that divided humanity into Jew and Gentile. Putting these... Read more
Sociologists working from various theoretical and political perspectives have worried that American society is fragmenting into two separate worlds. Our cities aren’t single anymore. Cities are dual, and the tale of late modernity is a tale of two cities. Jock Young (Vertigo of Late Modernity) isn’t convinced. He admits that “the setting up of barriers, of exclusion” is characteristic of late modern society (31). But that is only part of the story. He points out that the upper and upper... Read more
Jock Young (Vertigo of Late Modernity) discerns two sorts of “othering” in contemporary life: “the first is a conservative demonisation which projects negative attributes on the other and thereby grants positive attributes to oneself The second, very common yet rarely recognised, is a liberal othering where the other is seen to lack our qualities and virtues. Such a lacking is not seen, as in the conservative version, as an essential and qualitative difference so much as a deficit which is... Read more
It sure seems that the story of Joseph is a typological foreshadowing of the life of Jesus. Joseph is hated by his brothers; turned over to Gentiles; falsely accused; thrown into pit and prison; raised up, finally set on a throne, from which he gathers and distributes bread. Of course, there are plenty of discontinuities too: Joseph’s story takes place in Egypt; he doesn’t actually die and rise again; he sits on a throne in a well-known ancient empire; he... Read more
In an oracle against Edom, Jeremiah warns that the guilty will be sentenced to drink: “Behold, those who were not sentenced to drink the cup will certainly drink, and are you the one who will be completely acquitted? You will not be acquitted, but you will certainly drink it” (Jeremiah 49:12). The cup in question is the cup of wrath that the Lord is serving out to the nations (Jeremiah 25:15-29). Yahweh tells Jeremiah to announce to the nations, “Drink,... Read more
The late Jock Young observes in his Vertigo of Late Modernity that our period is characterized by “a combination of factors, some long existing yet unique in their combination, others pre-existent yet transformed in the present period. The impact revolves around three axes, the disembeddedness of everyday life, the awareness of a pluralism of values, and an individualism which presents the achievement of self-realisation as an ideal” (2). The combination is poisonous. Disembedded from institutions and corporate habits that sustained people... Read more
Jeremiah 46 is an oracle against Egypt, which, like Judah, is threatened by the advancing forces of Babylon. In the space of four verses (20-23), Jeremiah runs through a dizzying series of metaphors. Egypt is a pretty heifer (v. 20), and Nebuchadnezzar’s army is a “horsefly” that is going to sting Egypt without mercy. In verse 21, Egypt’s mercenaries are another sort of bovine – fatted calves. Of course, fatted calves are useful mainly for butchering and sacrifice, and that’s... Read more
In his little book, Alone Again, Zygmunt Bauman summarizes his characteristic themes: We live in a liquid world, nothing permanent, nothing solid, nothing predictable. Typically pungent, Bauman points to “the overall tendency to dismantle, deregulate and dissipate the once solid and relatively lasting frames in which the concerns and efforts of most individuals were inscribed. Jobs, once seen as ‘for life’, are more often that not now temporary and may disappear virtually without notice, together with the factories or offices or... Read more
In several dense paragraphs in The Fragmented World of the Social, Axel Honneth describes the Gyorgy Lukacs’s analysis of the fragmentation caused by capitalist society and the romantic reaction. There is, for starters, the fragmentation of the human being himself, induced by the capitalist separation of the worker from his work. The relation of the person to his own self becomes a relationship of “rent” because the worker can no longer express himself in the products of his labor: The auto... Read more
Chris Jenks argues in Subculture that “postmodernism’s critical imperative recommending the end of grand narratives is an invitation to dispense with the power/knowledge, truth and authority on which society, and, in many senses, the social bond, of yesterday were established” (3). One of the key theoretical tools has been an expansive concept of culture, developed within cultural theory. The concept of culture does much of the work of the earlier concepts of “society,” but without the causal claims inherent in sociology... Read more
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