The Lord’s response to Solomon’s prayer, and to Israel’s song and sacrifice, is laid out in an interlocking series of chiasms (2 Chronicles 7:12–22). After an introductory notice that Yahweh appeared to Solomon by night (v. 12), the first, affirmative response is a pledge of God’s presence and attention: A. I have heard prayer and chosen this place, 7:12b B. If I send shut heaven, command locust, send pestilence, 7:13 C. and My people humble themselves, pray, seek, turn, 7:14a... Read more
The Chronicler can’t talk about praise without breaking out in praise. He can’t describe Israel’s worship without worshiping. This tic makes for some convolution. After the ark ascends to Zion and enters the tent of David, the Levitical singers praise Yahweh. The Chronicler writes, “And with [the priests] were Heman and Jeduthun, and the rest who were chosen, who were designated by name, to give thanks to Yahweh—for His faithful love is everlasting” (1 Chronicles 16:41). He does it again in his... Read more
“Populism seems more and more to be an inevitable drift of unqualified liberal democracy,” writes John Milbank (244). Well, duh, we might say, except that this appears in a book published in 2009 (The Future of Love), before Le Pen or Brexit or Trump were the stuff of dreams and nightmares. And the essay itself was first published several years before that, in 2006. That “inevitable” is key. Milbank sees populism as a development within liberalism, not a reaction to it,... Read more
Psalm 72 is one of the most majestic, calmly triumphant Psalms in the Psalter. Attributed to Solomon, or written for Solomon, it is redolent of the glories of his reign. This king has received judgments from the God of Israel, and that enables him to pass judgment. Gifts from God to the king (v. 1) flow from the king to his people. The king’s name endures, but only because it is incorporated into the name of Yahweh, whose name is blessed forever.... Read more
“The time has come,” writes Luigino Bruni (The Wound and the Blessing), “to rewrite the economic and civil history of societies, taking seriously the civil and economic role of charisms.” It’s impossible “to understand either the past or the present situation in European economics deeply (or well beyond Europe) without taking charisms seriously” (99). Charisms are sources of social as well as spiritual renewal. Bruni includes religious charisms but finds them also in the socially innovative people who “committed themselves to... Read more
Enforcement of current immigration laws is a political prerequisite for immigration reform, whatever direction that reform is supposed to go. This is one of the points made by Peter Schuck in a dispassionate, informative piece on immigration in The American Interest. He cites the work of David Martin, whom he describes as “probably the country’s leading immigration scholar and a liberal immigration reform advocate with high-level agency experience.” Martin points to “this crucial but often-ignored political link between a more expansive... Read more
Don-John Dugas’s recent Shakespeare for Everyman offers a revisionist account of the rise of “authentic” stagings of Shakespeare in the twentieth century. The very meaning of “authentic” changed, as Sally Barnden explains in her TLS review of Dugas’s book: “Authentic Shakespeare performance was no longer understood to be that which staged, for instance, The Merchant of Venice in a grand reproduction of sixteenth-century Venice, but that which replicated the conditions of the play’s first performance, with limited set, early modern costume,... Read more
Reviewing Adrian Forty’s Concrete and Culture in the TLS, James Hall summarizes the shifting fortunes of concrete as a building material: “Reinforced concrete’s global heyday spanned roughly from the 1920s to the 60s, when exposed, cantilevered concrete was all the (modernist) rage. Then a pragmatic and/or postmodernist reaction set in: the boldness of reinforced concrete structures was now bleakness, not least because of porousness and poor weathering. Brutalism—the architecture critic Reyner Banham’s unwise transposition of Le Corbusier’s béton brut (raw concrete)—came... Read more
I’ve quoted this before, often, but it’s so good it merits re-quotation. From Luther’s 1528 “Confession”: These are the three Persons and the one God, Who has given Himself to us wholly with all that He is and all that He has. The Father gives Himself to us, with heaven and earth and all created things, that they may be profitable and of service to us. But this gift was obscured and made fruitless by Adam’s fall, and the Son... Read more
At the Daily Beast, Joel Kotkin exposes the “arrogance of Blue America,” expressed in talk of Blue State secession and contempt for Red State Trump country. According to Kotkin, “The blue bourgeoisie’s self-celebration rests on multiple misunderstandings of geography, demography, and economics. To be sure, the deep blue cites are vitally important but it’s increasingly red states, and regions, that provide critical opportunities for upward mobility for middle- and working-class families.” Blue Staters boast that “ten largest metropolitan economies represents... Read more
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