Suppose you’re walking to church to worship God. Along the way, your motive changes from piety to vainglory. You continue walking to church, but now you’re walking to church to be seen by others to be walking to church. What happened to the action of walking to church when your will changed? Thomas Osborne’s dense Human Act in Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus & William of Ockham shows that different medieval accounts of action gave different answers to that question. For... Read more
Suppose you’re walking to church to worship God. Along the way, your motive changes from piety to vainglory. You continue walking to church, but now you’re walking to church to be seen by others to be walking to church. What happened to the action of walking to church when your will changed? Thomas Osborne’s dense Human Act in Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus & William of Ockham shows that different medieval accounts of action gave different answers to that question. For... Read more
Oedipus was the ideal hero for classical Athens, a solver of riddles intent on discovering secrets. And the Sphinx was the perfect monstrous adversary. It’s no surprise that the story became one of the most famous myths of the ancient and modern worlds. In her recent brief monograph, Oedipus and the Sphinx, Almut-Barbara Renger argues that the Sphinx is multiply liminal: “No other figure could bring the many thresholds (occidental/oriental, Egyptian/Greek, human/animal, masculine/feminine) to be so impressively and so multifariously” (44).... Read more
Timothy Snyder reports that gay marriage got implicated in the Ukrainian uprising and the Russian response. Putin’s appeal to Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych included, as everyone knows, financial incentives. It also included warnings about the effect of entering the EU: The “gay conspiracy” has “dominated Russian propaganda throughout last year but which had been essentially absent from Ukraine. Perhaps Ukraine could join in? Yes indeed: the Ukrainian prime minister began to explain to his population that Ukraine could not have closer cooperation with... Read more
Zizek’s more violent apocalypticism avoids these difficulties of the milder but less coherent apocalyptic of Alain Badiou. It is the commitment and passion inherent in apocalyptic that attracts Zizek. The deconstructive theology of John Caputo destroys the very foundations of Christianity because it opens up a gap between the “spectral unconditional Event” and the “contingent instantiations,” rendering incarnation an impossibility. For Caputo, the truth sets free because it sets us free from Truth, which may be possessed in unequal portions... Read more
The whole of Marcia Angell’s review of Alison Wolf’s The XX Factor is worth careful reading. It’s a detailed sketch of the lives of upper-middle-class working women and the effect their entrance into the workplace has had on marriage and family. Some of those effects are ironic. Among the points Angell highlights is the theme of Wolf’s subtitle: “How the Rise of Working Women Has Created a Far Less Equal World.” Angell writes that upper middle class women marry men like... Read more
Micah ends with promises of deliverance from sin. “I” bear Yahweh’s indignation because of my sin, but He will deliver me (7:9). Yahweh will have compassion and “tread our iniquities under foot” (7:19). It’s a new exodus, as in the days when Yahweh performed signs in Egypt (7:15). Exiles will return (7:12). It’s like the protoevangelium outside Eden, as Israel’s enemies lick the dust like serpents (7:16) and are trampled under Yahweh’s feet (7:19). The specific contours of this soteriology... Read more
Israel is prohibited from uncovering nakedness of anyone who is “flesh of your flesh” (Leviticus 18:6). A man and a woman who already have a “flesh” relationship – whether biological or “covenantal” kinship – cannot add another one-flesh sexual relationship. An Israelite can rightly be joined in one flesh with a spouse only by first cutting off flesh. Israelite marriage mimics circumcision. Like sacrifice, marriage requires a division of flesh from flesh before a new union. Whatever the logic, the... Read more
In a 2005 Syracuse University dissertation on purity, Yohan Yoo traces some of the changes in purity regulations that took place in his three selected ancient purity systems – Egypt, Israel, and Greece. In the first, he finds what he describes as a “democratization of the mortuary texts” during the New Kingdom period. In the Old Kingdom, only Egyptian priests and Pharaohs had to be concerned about purity. Later documents indicate that common people “came to believe that they could... Read more
Leviticus contains only two narratives (chs. 10, 24), and its structure is dictated by speeches from Yahweh to Moses, who delivers them to Israel. Yet, in a rough and broad way, it’s possible to see a narrative shape to the book, particularly if we view it as a continuation of the book of Exodus, and particularly of the building of the tabernacle in the last third of Exodus. The story-line moves in two large cycles. First there is the building... Read more
Leithart
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In