Marin Cogan thinks that photobombs give us an insight into the culture of Washington. “Photobomb” is “a catch-all term for the act of appearing in a photo intended to capture someone likely much more important than you.” Photobombs can be funny, embarrassing, even slightly scandalous. If you’re caught in a picture with the right person, a photobomb can be a point of pride, a status symbol. They reflect the basic premises of Washington culture: “1) We are the heart of... Read more
Reviewing some new books about Samuel Johnson, Kate Chisolm notes Johnson’s conclusion concerning the impossibility of lexicography: “in the preface to his great Dictionary of 1755, in which he confesses that he set out to codify the language only to realize before he was even halfway through that no such thing is possible. Instead of giving up, Johnson persisted, even while recognizing the futility of his ambition, and understanding too well that ‘one enquiry only gave occasion to another, that... Read more
One of my students, Donny McNair, offers some fascinating thoughts on the raven and dove released by Noah from the ark. He connects the pair of birds to other pairs in the Bible – Cain and Abel, Elijah and Jonah, John and Jesus. The last two associations work particularly well. Elijah was fed by ravens, and Jonah’s name means “dove.” Both prophets are associated with “floods” that engulf the northern kingdom of Israel. Elijah announces the doom on the house... Read more
I offer some reflections on the anthropological import of the Protestant doctrine of justification at the Trinity House site. Read more
Not one of Jesus’ bones are broken. That’s a sign that He is the true Passover Lamb whose blood protects us from the angel of death. It is also a sign of his righteousness. According to Psalm 34, the righteous are afflicted often, but always rescued (v. 19). While the wicked are slain and condemned and slain (v. 21), the righteous survive with all their bones. Not one of them is broken (v. 20). Jesus’ intact bones are a witness... Read more
Jesus is tried by three courts – the Jewish Sanhedrin, the Herodian, and the Roman. In imitation of Jesus, Paul too is tried by the same three courts. So too is the church as a whole. The early chapters of Acts describe the Sanhedrin’s opposition to the early church’s witness and preaching, culminating with the stoning of Stephen (Acts 7). Christians scatter from Jerusalem to Samaria and eventually to Antioch. Saul the persecutor is changed to Paul the apostle. The... Read more
From what I can tell from the TLS reviewer’s summary of Paula Byrne’s The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things , this is a biography that gets Jane right. Byrne knows, for instance, that Austen did not lead the isolated, eventless life that many have suggested: “Austen, as her 160 surviving letters show, lived on a much wider stage, travelled more, lived more than such a stereotype allows for.” She knows that Austen’s “experience of place is remarkable:... Read more
From the NYTBR review, it seems that Lee Smolin is aiming to stretch the boundaries of the orthodoxy of physics in his latest, Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe . He thinks that the present has been left out of a physics that works on the belief that the future is determined by the past. In place of Newtonian and later ideas, he proposes a notion of “real time.” The reviewer summarizes: “He... Read more
In her conversion account, Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert An English Professor’s Journey into Christian Faith , Rosario Butterfield describes a talk she gave at Geneva College about sexual sin. She concluded that the Christian students who listened to her didn’t realize what sexual sin was all about. Even Christians consider sex recreational, and think of sexual sin as a matter of excess. Not so, she argues: “What good Christians don’t realize is that sexual sin is not recreational... Read more
Tyconius adopts a relentlessly ecclesiocentric reading of Revelation. Every positive symbol, it seems, is just one more way of describing the church. Heaven, angels, stars, mountains, and everything else, it seems, means “one and the same thing,” one of his favorite phrases. It creates some odd interpretations, to say the least. The birds that devour the kings of the earth at the end if chapter 19 are the saints who drink the blood of the wicked brothers who have been... Read more
Leithart
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