The Economist reports that “”The number of Americans giving up their passports has shot up, from less than 1,000 a year in the late 2000s to a record 3,415 in 2014.” One of the main reasons has to do with aggressive efforts to collect taxes from Americans who earn money outside America: “A new spur is the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) of 2010, which makes it a lot harder for Americans overseas to get (or keep) bank accounts,... Read more
Writing at the Atlantic, Christopher Orr complains that American political satire collapses easily into the standard American genre, melodrama. He puts the British and American versions of House of Cards in the balance, and the latter comes up wanting: “Tonally . . . the two shows are like night and day, except the BBC version is simultaneously lighter and darker. [Ian] Richardson imbues [Francis] Urquhart with a Mephistophelian glee. There is a winking naughtiness in his frequent asides, when he breaks... Read more
In the preface to Receptive Ecumenism, Paul Murray describes the three “voices” of the collection of essays in these terms: “(1) the dreaming of dreams; (2) the testing of such dreams for their viability; and (3) the discerning together of what might either hinder or promote their embodied ecclesial realization. These are the three voices, the three concerns, in which and in accordance with which the volume unfolds. We might refer to them respectively as the poetic, the analytic, and the... Read more
Revelation 13:16 is the first use of the word “mark” (charagma). It is a different word from “seal” in chapter 7 (sphragis). The mark of the beast looks like a mark of life and power. Those who refuse to worship the image of the beast are threatened with death (13:15), and they are excluded from the exchanges of buying and selling (13:17). If you want to live long and prosper, better get the mark of the beast. While God seals the 144,000... Read more
Solomon’s throne had six steps (1 Kings 10), with two lions flanking each step. That means 12 lions. Twelve lions are twelve tribes. But not all the tribes are leonine. Look back at Genesis 49, and you’ll find a donkey tribe (Issachar), a serpent tribe (Dan), a doe tribe (Naphtali), a wolf tribe (Benjamin). In Jacob’s blessing, only Judah is the lion’s whelp. Under Solomon, all the tribes have become leonine. They are being incorporated into the leonine tribe of... Read more
After the two witnesses, the seventh angel blows the seventh trumpet, and loud voices of praise break out in heaven (Revelation 11:15). We’re back in heaven, and the twenty-four elders prostrate themselves before the Lord, the pantokrator, and praise Him because the kingdom of this world (tou kosmou) has become the kingdom of the Lord (tou kuriou) and of Christ. Verse 18 gives liturgical expression to the pattern of events by which God comes to His throne. The verse is... Read more
In a series of studies, Michael Tomasello and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology have attempted to isolate what makes human cognition different from that of higher primates. Through a series of studies, they concluded that the key difference is what they call “shared intentionality,” the “we” factor. Humans have it from a very early age; primates do not. Tomasello and Malinda Carpenter summarize their findings in a 2007 article in Developmental Science. They have found that... Read more
The account of the two witnesses (Revelation 11:3-13) is arranged in a chiastic order: A. Two witnesses, olive trees, lampstands, vv 3-4 B. Devouring enemies with fire from mouth, v 5 C. Authority to shut up heaven, turn waters, smite earth, v 6 D. Beast from abyss makes war, overcomes, kills the witnesses, v 7 E. Body in street of great city for 3 1/2 days, v 8 F. Peoples, tribes, tongues, and nations look at bodies, v 9 F’.... Read more
Building on John Paul II’s theology of the body, Adam Cooper’s Holy Eros sketches out a “liturgical theology of the body.” He aims to show “how the liturgy bodily enacts the truth of our Christian faith, and how that truth in turn is expressed in the structure and bodily actions of Christian worship and the life of Christian discipleship” (1). Insofar as it is enacted in the liturgy, theology itself is “fundamentally a doxological, liturgical and thereby physical activity” that “enables... Read more
Richard Ayoade’s 2013 The Double, based on a Dostoevsky novella, is a dark comedy in every sense of the word. It takes place in a shrouded world, where all trains run underground, all lights are dim or flickering, where the few outdoor scenes occur at night. The comedy comes mainly at the expense of the lead character, Simon James (Jesse Eisenberg), a self-effacing, kind-hearted, somewhat creepy loser who feels as if he is invisible, a “Pinocchio” rather than a real... Read more
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