The Bride asks Dodi where he pastures the flock and where he finds shade at noon because she doesn’t want to be like those women who veil themselves beside the flocks (Song of Songs 1:7). The reasoning is obscure. Let’s see if we can unravel it a bit. She implies that if she doesn’t know where to find him, she will be as one covered. What does that mean? (more…) Read more
Come to Lebanon, my bride, the Lover says in the Song. Take the journey from the “dens of lions” and the “mountains of leopards” (Song of Songs 4:8). It’s a wild place with wild animals. But it’s also the temple/palace complex. The temple was paneled with cedar of Lebanon, Solomon built a house of the forest of Lebanon, and his throne hall was paneled with cedar (1 Kings 7:7). And in these cedar houses were cherubim with lion faces; in... Read more
American cotton farmers gets billions of dollars in subsidies. This comes from American taxpayers. It is the only way that American farmers, who have the highest production costs in the world, can remain profitable. And it affects the global cotton market in ways that damage lower-cost, smaller producers. Clyde Prestowitz ( Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism And The Failure Of Good Intentions ) explains (writing in 2003): “Despite its high production costs, America is the world’s largest exporter of cotton, competing... Read more
Capitalism, Ryn argues, does not have any “essence” or definition. Capitalism, like democracy, exists “only in particular historical manifestations.” And those historical manifestations are dependent on non-economic factors. Capitalism can be a “neo-Jacobin” system that dissolves traditional bonds and valuable structures and hierarchies, a system that reduces all values to monetary values. But Ryn argues that there might also be a “free market of goods and services . . . in a decentralized, group-oriented society in which the outlook and... Read more
Innocuous as it may seem, Ryn (in the aforementioned book) argues that the policies guided by “equality of opportunity” and “a level playing field,” if taken literally and seriously, would mean the destruction of traditional society: “equality of economic opportunity requires a radical transformation of society. It requires the removal of all those considerations that, in traditional civilization, limit and structure economic activity so as to make it compatible with or supportive of humane values that lie beyond supply and... Read more
In his 2003 America the Virtuous: The Crisis of Democracy and the Quest for Empire , Claes Ryn warns that a new libido dominandi has taken hold of the American character: “The signs are now everywhere that the will to dominate is breaking free of . . . traditional restraints. This is clear, for instance, from politicians who ignore or neutralize constitutional restrictions on their power and acquire ever-greater control over the lives of their fellow citizens.” But Ryn sees... Read more
In his introduction to Hermeneutics Reader: Texts of the German Tradition from the Enlightenment to the Present , Kurt Mueller-Vollmer gives us a very Hamannian Schleiermacher: “Man, the linguistic being, can be seen as the place where language articulates iself in each speech act and where each spoken utterance can be understood in relation to the totality of language. But man is also a constantly evolving mind and his speaking can only be understood as a moment in his mental... Read more
The ram caught by its horns in a bush beside the altar of Isaac is a clear type of the substitutionary sacrifice of Jesus. Church fathers pushed the analogy, partly based on the use of cornua to describe the extreme edges of the transverse of a cross. Justin combined this typology with the promise that Joseph would be like an ox pushing around his enemies with his horns to describe the victory of the cross: “No one can say or... Read more
The Song of Songs includes two full wasfs , poems that enumerate and commend the beauties of the Bride’s body (another wasf of the Bridegroom also appears in chapter 5). Though similar in form, the two differ at a number of points. In the first, the Bride is still veiled (4:1, 3), while in the second the veil has been removed (7:1-9). The progression between the two is not only from veiled to unveiled; the progression is also part of... Read more
Drawing out the Adam-Christ parallel, Irenaeus notes that Luke’s genealogy highlights not only Jesus’ connection with Adam but His embodiment of the nations: “for this cause Luke points out that the genealogy which extends from our Lord’s birth until Adam, has 72 generations, conjoining the end to the beginning, and implying, that it is he who in himself gathered up all nations, dispersed as they were since Adam, and the race of men together with Adam himself.” Read more
Leithart
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