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Medieval Figures
In his recent study of figural exegesis, Time and the Word, Ephraim Radner traces the “fate of…
Lessons from Alabama
Fellow Alabamian Quin Hillyer says that Trump should pay attention to what’s happening in Alabama if he…
Berkeley’s Book of Nature
Costica Bradatan wants us to attend to The Other Bishop Berkeley. The Berkeley that is most often…
Novel-Reading and Enlightenment
Allison Coudert (Religion, Magic, and Science in Early Modern Europe and America) speaks of an “anthropological revolution”…
Entering Rest, Entering Song
1 Chronicles 23:24-27 is arranged chiastically: A. Levites numbered from 20 years and up. B. David said.…
Poetic Apocalypse
Christian Wiman (My Bright Abyss, 51-2) claims that some poets—“surprisingly few”—possess “a very particular gift for making…
Enemy to Life
Christian Wiman (My Bright Abyss, 41) quotes a poem, “These Poems, She Said” by Robert Bringhurst, which…
Modernity’s Wager
Adam Seligman compares Modernity’s Wager to Pascal’s: Pascal’s wager of the seventeenth century, of reason for faith,…
Tale of Two Monsters
Timothy Beal (Religion and Its Monsters) analyzes Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1926) as a tale of two…
My Bright Abyss
One paragraph illustrates both the reasons I admire Christian Wiman’s 2013 searingly honest My Bright Abyss, and…
Sincerity or Ritual
The authors of Ritual and its Consequences (104–6) note a contrast between civilizations that are bound by…
From Greatness to Inclusivity
English students at the University of Pennsylvania made news last week by removing a portrait of Shakespeare…
The Divine Inversion
Mary gets more attention than usual this time of year, at least in Protestant churches. But Richard…
Prehistory of “Priestcraft”
“Priestcraft” was one of the charges regularly lodged by skeptics against clergy and theologians in early modern…
Therapeutic Culture
On this episode of the First Things Podcast: Editor Rusty Reno discusses Philip Rieff’s The Triumph of…
