At the beginning of Book 11 of Apuleius’s Golden Ass , Lucius returns to his human shape by prayer. As David Garland points out, the prayer is a good illustration of the kind of pagan prayers Jesus condemns in the sermon on the mount. In William Adlington’s 1556 translation, it reads: “I found good hope and soveraigne remedy, though it were very late, to be delivered from all my misery, by invocation and prayer, to the excellent beauty of the... Read more
Alex the African Grey died on September 6 at the age of 31. According to the obit in the Economist , Irene Pepperberg, a theoretical chemist who worked with Alex, had worked with Alex to the point that he “had the intelligence of a five-year-old child and had not yet reached his full potential. He had a vocabulary of 150 words. He knew the names of 50 objects and could, in addition, describe the colours, shapes and the materials they... Read more
In his splendid performance history of Shakespeare, David Bevington frequently comments on the “scenic literalism” of film and television. Commenting on a TV production of As You Like It , he laments that the production “tells us where we are in the story by putting entire landscapes or interiors in front of our eyes even before the characters have said a word. We ‘read’ the scene first in terms of its visual setting. In this case, the attempt is misguided... Read more
John Updike wrote that the ending of Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God “proved unexpected and, as I think about them, beautifully resonant, tragic and theological. That Ezeulu, whom we had seen stand up so invincibly to both Nwaka and Clarke, should be so suddenly vanquished by his own god Ulu and by something harsh and vengeful within himself, and his defeat in a page or two be the fulcrum of a Christian lever upon his people, is an ending few... Read more
Donald Barthelme’s The Dead Father is often viciously cynical, sometimes sexually explicit, but at times it hits home, hard. Like this: To the father who says in exasperation to his son, “I changed your diapers for you, little snot,” Barthleme imagines this response from the son: “This is not the right thing to say. First, it is not true (mothers change nine diapers out of ten), and, second, it instantly reminds Sam II of what he is mad about. He... Read more
INTRODUCTION Jesus teaches that our good works are light in a dark world (Matthew 5:14-16). At the center of the sermon, however, He describes acts of righteousness that are not to be done before men but before God alone. These secret acts are crucial to pursuing a righteousness that surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, and crucial to the coming of the kingdom. THE TEXT “Take heed that you do not do your charitable deeds before men, to be... Read more
Matthew 5:44: But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you in order that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven, for He causes His son to shine on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. Jesus’ instructions are radical, challenging. They are radical and challenging because Jesus is radical and challenging. And Jesus is radical and challenging because the heavenly Father, whose... Read more
Some more notes from Kierkegaard. 1. In the Problemata sections of Fear and Trembling , Kierkegaard, posing as Johannes de Silentio, poses a series of questions that arise from his reading of the story of Abraham and Isaac, within the Hegelian framework. The questions concern the “teleological suspension of the ethical,” the question of absolute duty to God, and the problem of Abraham’s secrecy. 2. In the first, he is defining the “ethical” in terms of universal rules, and the... Read more
Irenaeus is cited as one of the early proponents of apostolic succession through episcopal ordination. Only bishops who could reconstruct a line back to the apostles could claim apostolic authority: “With the succession of the episcopate they received the assured gift of truth.” Yet, according to K. J. Woollcombe, “in the earliest days, it is likely that bishops were elected and consecrated by their fellow-presbyters. Irenaeus can only have been consecrated to succeed the martyred Pothinus of Lyons by his... Read more
H. W. Montefiore, one-time vice-principal of Westcott House, Cambridge, and a priest in the church of England, argues that the episcopacy is of the plene esse of the church. Of those who claim it is if the esse , he writes, “if episcopacy were to be essential to the life of the church, God would have made it quite clear to us. He who had condescended to become man for the salvation of the world would not allow the benefits... Read more
Leithart
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In