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Between Rabbi and Outlaw
In a review of new editions of the works of Israeli novelist S.Y. Agnon, Robert Alter highlights…
Millennial Wrongs and Rights
Garry Wills is the NYRB’s resident expert on Evangelicals, and he gives an overview of the Evangelical…
Hypocrisy and Motive
When Jesus condemns hypocrisy, argues Oliver O’Donovan (Desire of Nations, 109–10), He is speaking of conformity to…
Abolition
Why didn’t the apostles move more quickly to protest and attempt to abolish slavery? There are various…
Weber the Idealist
Robert Scribner doesn’t think Protestantism “disenchanted” the world. Reformers did attack certain forms of medieval “magic.” They…
Christian Middle Ages?
John van Engen argues in a 1986 article that the romanticized “legend of the Christian Middle Ages”…
Evolution and Purpose
According to many biologists and philosophers of science, evolution has eliminated all notion of purpose, teleology, and…
Sir Virgil Thomson?
Christopher Carroll reviews two volumes of music criticism written by Virgil Thomson at the NYRB. Carroll characterizes…
An Elaborate Medieval Hoax?
Eamon Duffy tells the fascinating story of a Yale library manuscript, Beinecke MS 408, a book of…
Kulturkampf
Philip Rieff notes, “That word [Kulturkampf] first appeared in common German use in the early 1870s during…
Building the Confessional State
A 1989 article by Wolfgang Reinhard on the relationships among the Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and early modern state-building…
What Solomon Made
Overall, the Chronicler’s account of Solomon’s temple construction (2 Chronicles 3:1-5:1) is arranged chiastically: A. Solomon begins…
Protestant Sacred Space
Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe, edited by Will Coster and Andrew Spicer, aims to fill a…
Disenchanting Protestantism?
Scott Hendrix argues that the Reformation was united by an agenda of Christianization. By “Christianization,” he means,…
What We’ve Been Reading—3.31.17
Alexi Sargeant I read Brian Tinsman’s The Game Inventor’s Guidebook, a how-to for aspiring game designers, including…
