Ratzinger charged that after Vatican II, some Catholics “deliberately raised ‘desacralization’ to the level of a program.” By this, he was referring to a liturgical theology that begins from the abolition of the temple and the rending of the vile and concludes that “the death of Jesus, outside the City walls, that is to say, in the public world, is now the true religion. Religion, if it has any being at all, must have it in the nonsacredness of daily... Read more
The story is told of the desert father Abba Apollo, who was appalled when he encountered a devil without knees. John Ratzinger wrote of this story “The inability to kneel is seen as the very essence of the diabolical.” Read more
Malcolm Ruel, again in the Blackwell Reader in the anthropology of religion, traces the changing meanings of “faith.” For the Hebrew Bible, ‘mn “denotes . . . a quality of relationship: it was used of the reliability or trustworthiness of a servant, a witness, messenger, or a prophet, but is also served to characterize the relationship between God and his people, reciprocally trusted and trusting, bound by covenant to each other.” So too the Greek pist- group had to do... Read more
Asad identifies the particular moment when “Christianity” (in the pejorative sense I’ve used it) was invented: In the wake of the post-Reformation wars, Lord “Herbert produced a substantive definition of what later came to be formulated as Natural Religion – in terms of beliefs (about a supreme power), practices (its ordered worship), and ethics (a code of conduct based on rewards and punishments after this life) – said to exist in all societies. This emphasis on belief meant that henceforth... Read more
The aforementioned reader in anthropology of religion includes Talal Asad’s essay on the construction of “religion” as an anthropological concept. He argues that it is usually assumed, for instance, that medieval “religion” was the same in essence as modern religion, but that “its social extension and function were different in the two epochs.” This makes religion “a transhistorical and transcultural phenomenon” that by what is perhaps a “happy accident” dovetails exactly with the “liberal demand in our time that [religion]... Read more
The second edition of the Blackwell Reading in the Anthropology of Religion (edited, Michael Lambek) looks to be a great resource, for those who like such things. There are classic essays from Tylor, Durkheim, Weber, and Geertz, Wittgenstein on Frazer, Susanne Langer on symbols and Mary Douglas on clean and unclean animals, Victor Turner, Maurice Bloch, and Roy Rappaport on ritual. There’s a nice cross-section of theoretical essays and field-worky ones. Perhaps the most useful part of the volume are... Read more
In his Theology of the New Testament (Zondervan, 2005), Frank Thielman responds to the claim that justification is secondary to participation with Christ in Paul’s theology. Thielman does not agree, but he does say that it is true that “Paul’s references to the death of Christ more often support his notion of participation in Christ’s death than they support explanations of God’s justification of the sinner.” If true (and I take Thielman’s word for it), this would seem to have... Read more
John Judis has an interesting discussion of the roots and significance of Obama’s candidacy in the March 12 issue of TNR . In part, he sees it rooted in the American obsession with novelty. By presenting himself as the “candidate of the new,” Obama strikes a deep chord in the American imagination – R. W. B. Lewis’s notion that the hope to be a new Adamic race haunts American history and the recurring hope that we can re-start the American... Read more
In the journal Economica , Leo Kahane, David Paton and Rob Simmons offer an analysis of the supposed link between abortion rates and the reduction of crime rates in the UK (the article is entitled, “The Abortion–Crime Link: Evidence from England and Wales”). The authors challenge the findings of several articles by J. J. Donohue and S. D. Levitt (D&L), whose argument they Kahane, et. al., summarize as follows: (more…) Read more
INTRODUCTION On the day we call Palm Sunday, Jesus arrives in Jerusalem after a long journey. As He enters the city, the people proclaim Him as King. He is the King, the King come to inspect His house and declare judgment against it. THE TEXT “Now when they drew near Jerusalem, to Bethphage and Bethany, at the Mount of Olives, He sent two of His disciples; and He said to them, ‘Go into the village opposite you; and as soon... Read more
Leithart
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In