Jesus asks a series of questions about who John is, about what people were expecting from him. Did they go into the wilderness to see reeds shaken by the wind? Or a man in soft clothing? Or a prophet? The answer to the second is clearly No: John is not a man in soft clothing; he is not the kind of man found in kings’ palaces. And the answer to the first also seems to be No. John is not... Read more
Matthew 11:19: The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, Behold, a gluttonous man and a drunkard, a friend of tax-gatherers and sinners. Jesus’ teaching in this chapter is all about timing. He is the Coming One; the time of fulfillment has come, and the evidence is that He heals and teaches to the poor. John’s ministry divides the times in two. The time has come for Israel, but Jesus also says that Israel doesn’t know the... Read more
Matthew 11:11, 13: “Truly, I say to you, among those born of women there has not arisen anyone greater than John the Baptist; yet he who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he . . . . For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John. As we saw this morning, Jesus praises John as the last and the greatest of Israel’s prophets. Of all those who have been born of women, of all those... Read more
In Hosea 13:15, the prophet says of Ephraim, “Though he flourishes among the reeds, an east wind will come, the wind of the LORD coming up from the wilderness; and his fountain will become dry and his spring will be dried up; it will plunder his treasury of every precious article.” This is a picture of a reverse exodus. In Exodus 14:21, an “east wind” dries up the waters of the yam suph , the “Sea of Reeds” (cf. 15:22)... Read more
In her introduction to a new edition of Paradise Lost (Blackwell), Barbara Lewalski notes the oddness of Milton’s epic protagonists and setting. Citing the Proem to Book 9, she writes that Milton “has indeed given over the traditional epic subject, wars and empire, and the tradition epic hero as the epitome of courage and battle prowess. His protagonists are a domestic pair, the scene of their action is a pastoral garden, and their primary challenge is, ‘under long obedience tried,’... Read more
Putnam writes, “I agree with Rorty that the metaphysical assumption that there is a fundamental dichotomy between ‘intrinsic’ properties of things and ‘relational’ properties of things makes no sense; but that does not lead me to view the thoughts and experiences of my friends as just the intentional objects of beliefs that help me ‘cope.’ If I did, what sense would it make to talk of ‘solidarity’ [Rorty’s substitute for ‘objectivity’]? The very notion of solidarity requires commonsense realism about... Read more
Hilary Putnam has recently traced the “collapse of the fact/value dichotomy.” He does not deny that there is a distinction to be made, useful in some contexts, between statements of fact and statements of value, especially of ethical value. But he argues that a dichotomy between fact and value is indefensible, and that instead factual description and valuation are “entangled” with one another. A few points of his argument follow. (more…) Read more
Saussure argues that syntagmatic relations are more like multiplication than addition. Adding – eux to desir is not putting together “independent units”; rather the two “form a product, a combination of interdependent elements, their value deriving solely from their mutual contributions within a higher unit.” At another level, we can say the same about sentences: Words are not added up in a sentence, but the sentence is the product of something more like multiplication, the product of the interdependent elements... Read more
Would Saussure have agreed with Barr’s challenge to the notion that there is a difference between Greek and Hebraic mentalities evident in the differences between the languages? Barr appeals to Saussure at one or two points in his book ( Semantics ), and his project as a whole is reliant on Saussure’s structuralism. Yet, it seems that Saussure’s theory actually goes in the opposite direction. Below is a summary and brief (tentative) analysis of one section of Saussure’s Course ,... Read more
The English civil war, that is. Peter Harrison ( ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment ) traces the notion of comparative religious study to the confessional disputes in England, and the “diachronic pluralism” of the English monarchy: “As Locke put it, the kings and queens of post-Reformation England had been ‘of such different minds in point of religion, and enjoined thereupon such different things,’ that no ‘sincere and upright worshiper of God could, with a safe conscience, obey... Read more
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