Stepan Trofimovich, the vain Francophone liberal in Dostoevsky’s Demons, claims to know the gospels well from reading Renan, but in fact hasn’t read the Bible itself in a long time. During an illness, he comes to see himself as the liar he is and asks Sophia to read the gospels to him. He chooses to commit the story of the Gadarene demoniac to memory, ultimately concluding that though he had been the “head” of the devils, the miracle gave him hope that... Read more
Stepan Trofimovich, the vain Francophone liberal in Dostoevsky’s Demons, claims to know the gospels well from reading Renan, but in fact hasn’t read the Bible itself in a long time. During an illness, he comes to see himself as the liar he is and asks Sophia to read the gospels to him. He chooses to commit the story of the Gadarene demoniac to memory, ultimately concluding that though he had been the “head” of the devils, the miracle gave him hope that... Read more
Tercio Bretanha Junker’s Prophetic Liturgyhas much to commend it. Junker aims to show how the church is trained for “prophetic praxis” through the liturgy. Liturgy “should facilitate the community’s awareness of its biblical foundations, the Christian historical trajectory, a consciousness of its cultural unity, and attentiveness to the transformative resonance of prophetic Christian liturgical praxis seeking socio-economic justice in the world” (xx). This occurs through three “levels of ritual communication: spiritual/transcendental language (theology); socio-cultural-language (culture); and political/economic-language (ethics)” (xxi). He picks... Read more
Tercio Bretanha Junker’s Prophetic Liturgyhas much to commend it. Junker aims to show how the church is trained for “prophetic praxis” through the liturgy. Liturgy “should facilitate the community’s awareness of its biblical foundations, the Christian historical trajectory, a consciousness of its cultural unity, and attentiveness to the transformative resonance of prophetic Christian liturgical praxis seeking socio-economic justice in the world” (xx). This occurs through three “levels of ritual communication: spiritual/transcendental language (theology); socio-cultural-language (culture); and political/economic-language (ethics)” (xxi). He picks... Read more
Judaism and Christianity are often contrasted as an opposition between “ritualistic” and “nonritualistic” systems. Howard Eilberg-Schwartz (The Savage in Judaism, 140) argues that this is a mistake. The real difference is a difference of “root metaphor.” This is partly a difference between the pastoral/agricultural setting of Israel’s imaginative universe and the urban setting of early Christianity (139). More deeply, it is a difference between animal and human metaphor: Since Christians believe God has a human body, “social relations can be... Read more
Drawing from Robertson Smith, Howard Eilberg-Schwartz lists numerous biblical characters with animal names (The Savage in Judaism, 116): Eglon means calf, Nahash is a serpent, Oreb is Raven and Ze’eb is a wolf. Seir the Horite has Shobal (young lion), Zibeon (hyena), Anah (wild ass), Dishon (antelope). Leah is “bovine antelope,” while Rachel means “ewe.” From this he concludes that the analogy of human and animal was one of the root metaphors of the Israelite imagination, and from that he... Read more
In a dense paragraph, Milbank (“Theology Without Substance, Part 1,” Journal of Literature and Theology, 1988) draws on Paolo Rossi’s Dark Abyss of Time describes how English and Neopolitan writers put Spinoza, Hobbes, and de Lapeyrere to work in defense of orthodoxy – even in defense of Scripture and biblical chronology: “certain advocates (in differing speculative degrees) of the human origin of language in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, namely the Englishmen John Woodward, Edward Stillingfleet, Samuel Shuckford and William Warburton, together... Read more
Jesus has the key of David (Revelation 3:7), which allows him to open and shut. The statement is chiastic: A. who opens B. and no one shuts B’. and shuts A’. and no one opens. The sentence’s structure mimics the sentence’s content: It speaks of “opening” at the “open ends,” while the shutting is shut up in the middle. This chiasm is crossed by another structure, defined by the subject of the clause: A. Who [i.e., Jesus] opens B. no... Read more
I offer a meditation on Jesus’ entry into the silence of the grave at the Trinity House site. Click here. Read more
In his famed “culinary triangle” (see Food and Culture: A Reader) Claude Levi-Strauss suggested a triple classification of food: raw, cooked, and rotten. Raw is the natural state; cooked is a cultural transformation of nature, and rotten is a natural transformation. Those formed the corners of a triangle. Along the sides were specific practices of food preparation: Boiling was nearest the “rotten” and roasting nearest the “raw.” Roasting and boiling paralleled nature and culture respectively. To boil, you need a pot,... Read more
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