“Four corners of the earth” is taken as a piece of ancient cosmology, embedded in the Bible. But the Bible historicizes this cartography as it historicizes much else. The phrase “four corners” isn’t applied to land until Isaiah 11:12, which speaks of the Lord calling together His dispersed people from the “four corners of the earth.” Ezekiel uses the same phrase, but translators rightly translate it as “four corners of the land” (Ezekiel 7:2) because the focus is on Israel.... Read more
In his study of faith-based criminal justice initiatives, More God, Less Crime, Baylor’s Byron Johnson describes the puzzlement of leaders of the prison ministry, Champions for Life, over Johnson’s finding that “born-again prisoners were just as likely to return to prison as other comparable prisoners” (157). They cites 2 Corinthians 5:17, and asked, If someone has become a new creature in Christ, how can they return to a life of crime? Johnson’s answer is partly to point to the sad facts:... Read more
Pastor Rich Lusk of Trinity Presbyterian Church, Birmingham, suggests that the “leaven of their Pharisees” isn’t simply their teaching, but their entire vision of the coming kingdom. For the Pharisees, as Marcus Borg pointed out, the kingdom could come only if Israel pursued holiness by means of separation. At the center of Jesus’ kingdom is holiness-as-mercy, especially holiness as compassion for outsiders. The feeding miracles that surround Jesus’ warning about the Pharisees symbolize the impotence of the Pharisaical program. When... Read more
Fairy tales obviously have played an enormous role in folk culture over the centuries. Less well known perhaps is the role fairy tales have played in the intellectual life of the modern age, the age when we’ve given up belief in fairies. The collection compiled by the Brothers Grimm had a significant role in the development of German Romanticism. Structuralism has many sources, but one is Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folk Tale. Fairy tales have been subjected to psychoanalytic... Read more
Neuroscientist Jeffrey Zacks says that filmmakers know a lot about how brains work, even if they couldn’t explain the science. After all, they’re able to get people to pay good money to watch light flickering on a screen, and they can get these people frightened, sad, jubilant in the space of a couple of hours. Zacks’s Flicker explains how it works by showing how movies make use of everyday mental processes. Part I of Zacks’s book examines the experience of moving watching,... Read more
Over at the Trinity House site, I analyze the sevenfold description of Israel’s “good land” in Deuteronomy 8. Read more
Senator Robert Kennedy was shot on June 5, 1968. The next day, Veronica Lueken of Bayside, New York, was praying to St. Therese of Lisieux for Kennedy when she was surrounded by the fragrance of roses. Over the next months, she began writing poetry that she later attributed to St. Therese. By the time she died in 1995, she claimed she had received and communicated 300 messages from Jesus, Mary, and saints. The messages were not reassuring. She became convinced... Read more
R. Taggart Murphy has been writing on Japanese politics, business and economics for a long time, but the rest of the world has lost interest. What fascinates, he says, is Japanese culture – the fashions, the anime, the weirdness of a country where you can pay 7000 yen to be mothered by an attractive young woman for an hour. Murphy’s Japan and the Shackles of the Past is an effort to show how the business and economic challenges of Japan are... Read more
R. Taggart Murphy has been writing on Japanese politics, business and economics for a long time, but the rest of the world has lost interest. What fascinates, he says, is Japanese culture – the fashions, the anime, the weirdness of a country where you can pay 7000 yen to be mothered by an attractive young woman for an hour. Murphy’s Japan and the Shackles of the Past is an effort to show how the business and economic challenges of Japan are... Read more
“Who are these, and where have they come from?” an elder asks John about the innumerable multitude (Revelation 7:13). John answers, “You know,” and the elder does know, as he goes on to explain. So why the pretense of ignorance? In part, the exchange takes us back to the early chapters of John’s gospel, where Jesus describes the life of those born of Spirit. Like the wind, they are audible, but you can’t tell where they come from or where... Read more
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