Emma Pierson studied “studied 1 million matches made by the online dating website eHarmony’s algorithm, which aims to pair people who will be attracted to one another and compatible over the long term; if the people agree, they can message each other to set up a meeting in real life. eHarmony’s data on its users contains 102 traits for each person — everything from how passionate and ambitious they claim to be to how much they say they drink, smoke and... Read more
Andrew Parker is no creationist, and he has little patience for intelligent design. Yet he thinks that Genesis 1’s account of the origin of the universe is scientifically accurate. He asks “Could it be that the creation account on page one of Genesis was written as it is because that is how the sequence of events really happened?” (The Genesis Enigma, xiii). By the end of the book, he is answering that question affirmatively. What impressed Parker were the parallels... Read more
Shakespeare’s Words bills itself as a “glossary” and it is that. David and Ben Crystal combed through all of Shakespeare’s works identifying potentially “difficult” words, and this handbook is the result. As you would expect, they give crisp definitions, along with citations from the plays, for unfamiliar Elizabethanisms: fardel, bodkin, contumely, grise, pucelle, quat, snaffle, swinge. But they also define words that we think we know. Their definitions of “kindness” bring out the connection of kinship, natural kind, and affection... Read more
Classic atonement theories have looked past the gospel narratives in an effort to uncover the underlying substructure, logic or mechanism of atonement. What if the gospel narratives are the atonement theory? What if, instead of God’s offended honor or God’s reputation for just rule, we began our atonement theories with “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham” or “In the days of Herod, king of Judea” or “In the beginning was... Read more
Millennials aren’t apathetic or lazy, argues Zachary Fine in the NYT. They are simply paralyzed, and pluralism is one of the causes. “The art critic Craig Owens once wrote that pluralism is not a ‘recognition, but a reduction of difference to absolute indifference, equivalence, interchangeability.’ Some millennials who were greeted by pluralism in this battered state are still feelings its effects. Unlike those adults who encountered pluralism with their beliefs close at hand, we entered the world when truth-claims and qualitative... Read more
By the time a child is two, he or she has developed “narrative” memory, the ability to “store” and recall events in story form. This is essential to the development of thought and self-reflection, but it is, Daniel Siegel argues, a shared, social process (The Developing Mind, 60-1), one that depends not only on the child but on his interaction with others, especially parents. Siegel writes, “children who narrate life events with their parents will begin to narrate to themselves.... Read more
The first of several of essays on Shakespeare is up at the Colson Center Worldview Journalthis morning. Read more
“Longinus” describes the sublime as “the echo of a great soul” (de Sublimitate, 9.2)). The sublime can be expressed in silence or in speech, and it can be found the terrible, awe-inspiring acts of the gods. But Longinus worries that Homeric accounts of the gods “if they be not taken allegorically, they are altogether impious, and violate our sense of what is fitting. Homer seems to me, in his legends of wounds suffered by the gods, and of their feuds,... Read more
In a 1978 article on funeral maledictions among Greeks, Louis Robert records a curse from an inscription. Various sources have been suggested, but Robert concludes that the malediction is a word for word translation of Deuteronomy 28:22, 28. He quotes one scholar’s conclusion that an inscription that quotes Deuteronomy alongside references to the Erinyes and Graces must come from a Jew or a proselyte. Robert disagrees, and cites Adolf Deissmann in support: “Cette inscription appartient aux monuments les plus anciens... Read more
Shayne Cohen notes in his Beginnings of Jewishness that “many gentiles in antiquity recognized that the God of the Jews was a powerful God” (142). He cites the magical papyri that “routinely invoke the ‘God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,’ ‘Iao Sabaoth,’” as well as “a disciple of the orator Herodes Atticus” who “quoted two verses from Deuteronomy 28 in the warning curse he included in the epitaph for his son. This gentile knew that a curse backed by the authority of... Read more
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