Philip Roth famously announced last year that he was quitting. Writing in the TLS, Adan Thirlwell suggests that what he’s actually doing is continuing his career in an inverted fashion. Thirlwell cites a 1984 interview with Hermione Lee, where Roth described his working method: “Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life. There has to be some pleasure in this job, and that’s it. To go around in disguise.... Read more
Philip Roth famously announced last year that he was quitting. Writing in the TLS, Adan Thirlwell suggests that what he’s actually doing is continuing his career in an inverted fashion. Thirlwell cites a 1984 interview with Hermione Lee, where Roth described his working method: “Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life. There has to be some pleasure in this job, and that’s it. To go around in disguise.... Read more
David Thomson (at TNR) thinks that Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death, and his legacy of acting, raises some fundamental questions about what we take as entertainment these days: “No movie actor has risked so much on despondency. This is not to say that every film star has been single-mindedly happy: we know enough to appreciate the uneasiness in Chaplin and Keaton, Tracy and Bogart, ?or Jack Nicholson and Daniel Day-Lewis, from biographical sketches and from some of their screen work. Yet... Read more
Jezebel and her children are ostensibly the ones who are obsessed with the “deep things (bathea) of Satan” (Revelation 3:24). That fits into the letter to Thyatira in various ways. For starters, Jehu accused Jezebel of being involved in sorcery (2 Kings 9:22), and the church’s counterpart to Jezebel is likewise a sorceress. Pharaoh had sorcerers, and so purging sorcerers from Israel is a way of purging Egypt. The Greek word bathea appears only twice in the LXX (Job 12:22;... Read more
Evelyn Barish’s The Double Life of Paul De Manhas received mixed reviews. The NYTBR review cataloged minor errors to build a case against Barish’s reliability. Robert Alter’s review in The New Republic finds Barish’s case compelling. The case is moral and not merely intellectual. Alter writes that de Man “assembled a group of investors to create a publishing house called Hermès, which was to bring out opulent art books. From the beginning it was clear that his intent was not to establish a... Read more
Registration is now open for the Pentecost term course at Trinity House, an introduction to liturgical theology taught by Pastor Jeffrey Meyers of Providence Reformed Presbyterian Church, St. Louis. For more information and registration, click here. Read more
Registration is now open for the Pentecost term course at Trinity House, an introduction to liturgical theology taught by Pastor Jeffrey Meyers of Providence Reformed Presbyterian Church, St. Louis. For more information and registration, click here. Read more
A friend recently criticized the popular use of dance imagery to describe the perichoretic life of the Trinity. I laughed and played along. I’ve been in churches that have tried to enact the perichoretic dance, and, trust me, it ain’t inspiring. But then I want to say: Doesn’t that criticism assume that interpersonal relations, knowledge, and love are inherently un-dancelike? But what if love, relationship, and love are a dance? What if dance is the shape of personal knowing? What if,... Read more
God hangs the earth on nothing (Job 26:7). That’s literally true. There’s no changeless substance beneath the surface of change, nothing holding us up, making it all stable and safe. There’s nothing holding creation in place except God. Every effort to hang the world on something, every effort to find some stable foundation in the creation, is idolatry. It’s one of the most persistent and pious forms of idolatry. Read more
In his contribution to The Reader Must Understand, Crispin Fletcher-Louis argues convincingly that “heaven and earth” in Jesus’ eschatological discourses doesn’t refer to “a collapse of the space-time universe . . . but as a collapse of a mythical space-time universe which is embodied in the Jerusalem temple” (162). He goes on to argue that this is also the referent in Jesus’ statement that the Torah would stand until “heaven and earth” pass away (Matthew 5:18). That refers, he suggests, to... Read more
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