In his Caused to Believe, William Bonney follows up suggestions from Charles Giblin regarding the structure of John’s prologue and the structural connections between the prologue and the gospel. Giblin finds what he calls an X-Y pattern in the prologue: “The X of this pattern encompasses verses 1–13. The Y is made up of 14–18.24 Of the X section, Giblin notes that John discusses the Word . . . in its relation to ‘third persons.’ That is in relation to ‘God’... Read more
When John enters heaven (Revelation 4), He sees the Enthronement as a precious stone, a stone glowing with light, a stone that sparkles like a star, and He is surrounded with a rainbow that is also described as a precious stone. Specifically, the stone is the emerald. This is the fourth stone in the list of the stones on the high priest’s breastplate, the first in the second row (Exodus 28:18). Judah has taken the first spot, and the next three... Read more
When John enters heaven (Revelation 4), He sees the Enthronement as a precious stone, a stone glowing with light, a stone that sparkles like a star, and He is surrounded with a rainbow that is also described as a precious stone. Specifically, the stone is the emerald. This is the fourth stone in the list of the stones on the high priest’s breastplate, the first in the second row (Exodus 28:18). Judah has taken the first spot, and the next three... Read more
In his TLS review of Kathryn Walls’s study of the symbolism of Una in Spenser’s Faerie Queene (God’s Only Daughter), Bart van Es compares Walls’s book to that of John Dixon, a sixteenth century farmer who annotated his copy of Spenser: “Like Dixon, Walls takes the Bible and sixteenth-century theology as her primary frame of reference and, like him, she tends to leave Spenser’s literary influences (such as Virgil, Ariosto and Tasso) to one side. Unlike Dixon, Walls is not... Read more
David Owen’s fascinating New Yorker piece on airline seating included these tidbits. “seat-back video screens and the hard frames that surround them pose a safety challenge, partly because of the potential for injuries caused by head strikes, and partly because the computers and the electrical systems that serve them have to be both fireproof and fully isolated from the plane’s—so that crossed wires in somebody’s seat don’t allow a ten-year-old playing a video game to suddenly take control of the cockpit. Largely... Read more
Robert Kaplan argues in Asia’s Cauldron that control of the South China Sea is going to be critical in the geopolitics of this century. According to Ian Morris’s NYTBR review, “Kaplan starts out from some basic economics. More than half of the world’s annual merchant fleet tonnage (including four-fifths of all the oil burned in China) passes through the South China Sea. This commerce, Kaplan says, has turned that waterway into ‘the throat of the Western Pacific and Indian Oceans —... Read more
Robert Kaplan argues in Asia’s Cauldron that control of the South China Sea is going to be critical in the geopolitics of this century. According to Ian Morris’s NYTBR review, “Kaplan starts out from some basic economics. More than half of the world’s annual merchant fleet tonnage (including four-fifths of all the oil burned in China) passes through the South China Sea. This commerce, Kaplan says, has turned that waterway into ‘the throat of the Western Pacific and Indian Oceans —... Read more
One of the burdens of William Easterly’s The Tyranny of Experts is that the state is one of the great obstacles to development. As Howard French summarizes the argument in the NYTBR, “Easterly’s stories unfailingly reinforce a select number of crucial themes, the boldest being that the people of the so-called underdeveloped world have been systematically betrayed by the technocrats in charge of the global development agenda. ‘The technocratic approach ignores what this book will establish as the real cause of... Read more
Anthony Gottlieb uses his review of Rebecca Goldstein’s Plato at the Googleplex to speculate on how ancient philosophers might have employed social media and information technology: “The epigrammatic Heraclitus would surely have appreciated the enforced brevity of Twitter. Diogenes the Cynic, who made a spectacle of himself in order to heap scorn on conventional values (to which end he allegedly masturbated in public), would presumably have relished Facebook — until his selfie-strewn account was deleted. Diogenes Laertius, an infamously undiscerning historian,... Read more
Tom Phillips reports in the Telegraph that China is “poised to become not just the world’s number one economy but also its most numerous Christian nation.” According to Purdue’s Fenggang Yang, it will happen in “less than a generation.” Phillips adds, “China’s Protestant community, which had just one million members in 1949, has already overtaken those of countries more commonly associated with an evangelical boom. In 2010 there were more than 58 million Protestants in China compared to 40 million in... Read more
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