Month: September 2007
-
Peter Lombard’s Two Cents
Peter Lombard (1100-1160) was a medieval theologian whose masterwork, The Sentences, was “the enduring classic, the standard introduction to systematic theology in the medieval university curriculum,” in the words of his biographer Marcia Colish. Colish even argues that systematic theology was a twelfth-century invention in a certain sense: While there was plenty of Bible interpretation,…
-
Patriotic Picture
“It’s a grand old rag,” wrote Irving Berlin, but nobody wanted to sing it that way, so eventually he changed it to “grand old flag.” Freddy Age Seven provides a 9/11 patriotic montage with a giant Star Spangled Banner waving in the sky –okay, so it’s spangled with exactly two stars, but you get the…
-
(How) Do Women Sin?
Back in 1960, Valerie Saiving Goldstein wrote a short article called “The Human Situation: A Feminine View” in which she made a simple assertion: men and women sin differently. In her own words: The temptations of woman as woman are not the same as the temptations of man as man, and the specifically feminine forms…
-
Homer and Bluegrass
No, this is not a review of the great Coen Brothers movie O Brother Where Art Thou, which loosely re-told Homer’s Odyssey in an Americana mode. Instead, it’s a note about the composition of those two ancient Greek epics, Iliad and Odyssey, that bear the name of Homer. Homeric studies took a quantum leap forward…
-
The Theology of Sleep
What in the world is sleep? You might spend as much as a third of your life in this condition, but it’s the third that most people tend to ignore. We greet each other and interact out in the waking world, but every one of us retires at night to a private time of passivity…
-
So Many Good Books: Wesley’s Christian Library
John Wesley lived by the Bible and claimed to be a man of one book (homo unius libri). But his single-minded focus on Scripture did not result from failing to read other books. It was something he achieved on the far side of wide reading and much learning. Wesley knew how to learn from Christians…
-
Covered Wagon
Moseyin’ along in the wild west, this stick-figure settler encourages his stick-figure horse to keep it movin’. The stick figure wheels keep turnin’ over, bumpin’ along on the long line of holes in the printer paper, I mean territory. The stick-figure sky is bright blue, and the settler sings out, “My heart’s as big as…
-
WWJD: How Could Jesus Do Miracles?
My conversion to Christianity occurred in November 1968. I was a junior at the University of Missouri, chaos was violently spreading across American college campuses, and it was in the early stages of the Jesus Movement. I came to Christ through the ministry of Campus Crusade and, upon my conversion, I became a pretty radical…