Mummies don’t go to waste, Ana Ruiz tells us in The Spirit of Ancient Egypt : “By the 11th century, Egyptian mummies were being ground into powder and sold as Mummia Vera; this was marketed as an aphrodisiac and a medicine. The great Persian physician Avicenna prescribed Mummia for just about every illness. By the 16th century, Mummia Vera had become highly sought after and was sold in apothecaries throughout Europe well into the 17th century” (95-6). During the Civil War,... Read more
Two recent pieces highlight neglected dimensions of corporate and upscale welfare, already wealthy people making large amounts of money from the tax dollars of ordinary people. At Slate , Krissy Clark asks the obvious question of who ultimately benefits from food stamp programs. The program feeds poor kids and families, of course, but they don’t get food unless they take their stamps to approved stores: “Last year $76 billion flowed from the U.S. Treasury to people’s food stamp cards. That money... Read more
Larry Sidentop’s Inventing the Individual is intellectual history of the old school, the broad-sweep, big-idea type. Jeffrey Collins thinks that for all the dangers the book works (TLS review). It is “a thoroughly interesting and fundamentally convincing book.” The key development, Siedentop argues, was the “Christian revolution” that gave a central place to “equal individuals” in Western thought and institutions. Christianity marked a sharp break from the classical past. In Collins’s summary, Siedentop “presents a world of suffocating hierarchy, saturated with assumptions... Read more
Robert Kaplan offers a brief in defense of empire at the Atlantic. “Throughout history,” he argues, “governance and relative safety have most often been provided by empires, Western or Eastern. Anarchy reigned in the interregnums.” Globalization today depends on the infrastructure of the British empire: “as the Harvard historian Niall Ferguson has argued, the British Empire enabled a late-19th- and early-20th-century form of globalization, tragically interrupted by a worldwide depression, two world wars, and a cold war. After that, a new... Read more
Derek Thompson analyzes the “savior fallacy” that drives many NBA teams in the Atlantic . It has several components: Mediocrity is the worst, and mediocre teams stay mediocre, so “tanking” becomes a deliberate strategy; one top draft choice can change a loser into a championship team; so, it’s best to be horrible than mediocre. It’s wrong at every point. Mediocre teams don’t stay mediocre. Almost no team rises from the basement to the top because of a savior draft pick. Thompson... Read more
Why are the seven letters of Revelation addressed to churches in Asia Minor? Asia Minor isn’t a focus of interest at all in the Old Testament, though much of Paul’s ministry is carried out among diaspora communities and churches there. That only shifts the question: Why is Paul interested in Asia Minor? For Paul, Asia Minor represents a transitional, liminal area between Judea/Jew and Rome/Gentile. The gospel goes to the Jew first, and then to the Greek, and that is... Read more
Jesus has “life in Myself” (John 5:26). That appears to be an inherent quality. But Jesus doesn’t set inherent and received in opposition: The life that He has in Himself is a gift from His Father. His quality of having-life-in-Himself is given to Him from Another. And when He gives Himself, He gives this same quality: “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in yourselves” (John 6:53). We might... Read more
Jesus has “life in Myself” (John 5:26). That appears to be an inherent quality. But Jesus doesn’t set inherent and received in opposition: The life that He has in Himself is a gift from His Father. His quality of having-life-in-Himself is given to Him from Another. And when He gives Himself, He gives this same quality: “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in yourselves” (John 6:53). We might... Read more
John records Jesus saying “Amen, Amen” some twenty-five times. It’s typically understood as an oath formula, a “double witness” that stresses the truth of what Jesus says. But there’s an additional dimension. The double Amen appears in the Old Testament only a few times. The people respond to Ezra’s blessing of Yahweh with “Amen, Amen” (Nehemiah 8:6), and several of the books of the Psalter end with a form of the double Amen: “Amen and Amen” (41:13; 72;19; 89:52)_ The... Read more
Joan Cadden’s Nothing Natural is Shameful is many things: A careful study of the medieval reception and use of various Aristotelian texts; an analysis of medieval natural philosophy and ethics and the relation between the two; a contribution to research about Western views of sodomy; a study of medieval notions of masculinity and femininity. She takes her title from the claim of Walter Burley that “nothing natural is shameful,” and examines how various writers – Pietro d’Abano, Jean de Jandun, and... Read more
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