In the same 2005 Critical Inquiry article where he quotes Freud on kissing, he gives a brief, provocative phenomenology of kissing. The mouth, he asserts, is the most intimate part of the body that is generally public. Eyes traditionally reveal the soul, but the mouth is a yawning entry into the body. Hence: “The lips are a boundary. They are portals where the inside is exposed to the outside, where the breath of life passes in and out, where food... Read more
In what J. Hillis Miller calls a “somewhat puritanical passage” from the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis , Freud targets kissing as the “first perversion” of sex: “There is something else that I must add in order to complete our view of sexual perversions. However infamous they may be, however sharply they may be contrasted with normal sexual activity, quiet consideration will show that some perverse trait or other is seldom absent from the sexual life of normal people. Even a... Read more
The Hebrew shir (song) is used vastly more often in the Psalmter than anywhere else, as one would expect. It appears over 40 times there, and doesn’t even reach double figures in any other book. In the Pentateuch as a whole, the word appears only eight times. The word is, of course, also the title of Solomon’s shir , and one ofthe Psalter uses is very close to the use in the Song of Songs. Psalm 45 is entitle a... Read more
Doug Bandow summarizes a Pew Forum report on religious persecution that concludes that persecution is increasing throughout the world: “Two years ago, Pew reported that 70 percent of humanity suffered from either government persecution of or social hostility to religion. Add more moderate restrictions of the sort which Americans would still reject and an incredible 86 percent of the world’s peoples did not enjoy genuine religious liberty. That trend is growing. According to Pew’s new study, ‘more than 2.2 billion... Read more
The Farrer quotations come pouring in. OK, trickling. Here’s one from a reader, Jeff Peterson: “Man, once endowed with speech, starts making an inventory of the universe. The speaker, having labelled everything else, labels himself, and becomes an item on his own list. He is now no more than a pebble on the beach, a part of the description he constructs; he falls under the net of an impartial rule, an equal justice binding on himself as much as on... Read more
Austin Farrer makes the simple observation that “What was expressed in human terms here below was not bare deity; it was divine sonship.” Then he adds this beautiful passage: “God cannot live an identically godlike life in eternity and in a human story. But the divine Son can make an identical response to his Father, whether in the love of the blessed Trinity or in the fulfillment of an earthly ministry. All the conditions of action are different on the... Read more
Susanna Wesley thought Aristotle mistaken for positing eternal matter, but she thought that Aristotle was driven to this conclusion by the true supposition that “a true notion of the goodness of God” must lead to an idea that God “must eternally be communicating good to something or other.” God must be somehow social; matter must have been around to socialize with. Wesley concluded that Aristotle would not have driven to this error if he had possessed “knowledge of revealed knowledge”:... Read more
In a 2005 article, David Rowe reviewed the 19th-century liberal belief that the formation of a global economy would bring enduring peace. The arguments sound a tad familiar: “Liberals identify at least three closely related means by which globalization pacifies society. First, globalization generates powerful new social classes with vested interests in peace . . . Second, globalization endows societies with pacific social and personal values that constrain the state’s ability to generate and wield military force . . .... Read more
It would be difficult to find a better short statement on the inspiration of Scripture than this: “Those things revealed by God, which are contained and presented in the texts of Holy Scripture, were written under the influence of the Holy Spirit . . . . In the process of composition of the sacred books, God chose and employed human agents, using their own faculties and powers, in such a way that while he was acting in them and through... Read more
Augustine doesn’t think interpretive pluralism as a big problem: “What difficulty is it for me when these words can be interpreted in various ways, provided only that the interpretations are true? What difficulty is it for me, I say, if I understand the text in a way different from someone else, who understands the scriptural author in another sense? In Bible study, all of us are trying to find and grasp the meaning of the author we are reading, and... Read more
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