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Separation and Incorporation
In his contribution to Signifying Identities, Fredrik Barth suggests that our notion of political, economic and social…
Early Christian Disenchantment
Guy G. Stroumsa writes in The Making of the Abrahamic Religions in Late Antiquity that “For Weber,…
From Reform to Revolution?
Michel de Certeau (The Writing of History, 126-7) quotes Alphonse Dupront on the post-Reformation situation of the…
Dynamic eternity
Richard Sorabji observes (Time, Creation, and the Continuum) that there have been disputes among philosophers concerning the…
Defining Musical Modernity
Karol Berger (Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow) sets out to reassess what we mean by “modernity” in music.…
Equality and Difference
Oliver O’Donovan (Desire of Nations, 262-3) points to the difficulty in the concept of equality. A purely…
Luther and Medieval Piety
The great question haunting late medieval piety was that of the inadequacy of human piety. As Berndt…
Uncovering Carnage
We typically don’t bother to keep pace with the 24-hour news cycle or the daily political horserace…
The Unity of Christian Europe
In a 1971 essay, H.G. Koenigsberger challenged the notion that the Reformation broke up a unified Europe.…
Reformation Rhetoric
Peter Matheson (Rhetoric of Reformation) recognizes that polemic is “both necessary and useful” (8). It enables underdogs…
Ladder to Heaven
2 Chronicles 3-4, the Chronicler’s account of the temple, uses the phrase “left and right” several times.…
The Pillars that Huram Built
In her study of Leviticus as Literature, Mary Douglas notes the “house that Jack built” quality of…
Pollution and Purgation in the Reformation
In a famous essay on “rites of violence” in sixteenth-century France, Natalie Zemon Davis argued that one…
Creating the Temple
The Chronicler’s account of the construction of Solomon’s temple (2 Chronicles 3:1-5:1) follows the creation week of…
Keep the Mighty from the Small
Like Peter Singer and Jeff McMahan, I have sympathy for Anna Stubblefield, the Rutgers professor who was…
