Bible
Story Stream
Jordan Peterson’s Bible Study January 09, 2025
If there’s one thing Jordan B. Peterson has proved in his almost-decade run as an internationally known public intellectual, it’s that he can fight. Since his 2016 criticism of a Canadian law for effectively compelling speech related to the use of ce...
The Bible and Poetry June 14, 2023
We do not read the Bible as it is meant to be read. Theology always risks leading us astray by elaborating its own discourse, with the biblical texts merely as a point of departure. The presence of poetry in the Bible is the key to a more pertinent a...
The Woman Who Gave the World a Thousand Names for God October 05, 2022
How a British linguist and a failed Nigerian coup changed everything about Bible translation....
The Godless Bible July 22, 2022
Robert Alter’s Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary is a massive achievement—literally. The three-volume box set weighs 11 pounds. The largest volume, with more than fourteen hundred pages, should be read with book and reader situated comforta...
Earliest Images of Two Biblical Heroines Unearthed July 19, 2022
In the Old Testament’s Book of Judges, two women—Deborah and Jael—help defeat the Canaanite general Sisera. Now, archaeologists in Israel’s Lower Galilee have unearthed 1,600-year-old mosaics depicting their stories, according to a statement from the...
The Godless Bible July 15, 2022
Robert Alter's Bible is hauntingly beautiful at points, but he is doggedly determined not to let his readers see Jesus....
Charles Dickens and the Bible June 27, 2022
The responsible teaching of literature and other humanistic studies from kindergarten through college may be said to require balancing two countervailing interests and tendencies — the understandable, but sometimes authoritarian, “centripetal” desire...
A God Beyond Logic June 24, 2022
The first thing I learned about natural theology was that it was wrong. The idea that God’s existence could be proven by simply observing life on Earth – that divine presence could be found in human eyes, the wings of bees, the order of orchids or th...
My First Bible May 17, 2022
The first time I learned of the Bible was when my grandmother physically attacked it. She had wrested it from my mother’s hands, opened it, and started tearing handfuls of dense onionskin pages in two. I was almost 7 years old, and this happened in L...
The Individual and the Church April 11, 2022
In Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism, Larry Siedentop argues that Christianity birthed both individualism and equality and hence modern liberalism. In doing so, Siedentop argues, Christianity exploded the ancient world’s tig...
Harmonizing Genesis and Evolution March 30, 2022
Loren Haarsma maps out the prevailing schools of thought on the origins of humanity and sin....
‘Under Jerusalem’: Layers of History and Faith December 20, 2021
In “Civilization and Its Discontents,” Freud compared memory and its recovery to the archaeology of Rome. The visitor cannot see the earlier layers of civilization, but the guidebook says where they once were. This allows us to look at the Colosseum ...
Becoming a Religion of the Book December 20, 2021
The oldest scriptures that eventually became the Bible were created within an environment where no appreciable religious function was assigned to texts. The stories, proverbs, songs, and prayers dating from the ninth and eighth centuries bc that rese...
God in Translation December 20, 2021
Not long after Jesus ascended into heaven, his bewildered friends huddled in a room together and wondered what would come next. Then it happened: “[S]uddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the whole hous...
How Spirituality Shaped Leonard Cohen November 26, 2021
Do you ever feel that a book should be an essay, an essay a paragraph, a paragraph a sentence? That’s not quite the case with Harry Freedman’s “Leonard Cohen: The Mystical Roots of Genius,” a guided tour of the singer-songwriter’s various spiritual i...
A Literary Seance Calls Up the Bible November 22, 2021
“In the beginning, the mountains had great wings.” So begins Italian publisher and writer Roberto Calasso’s The Ruin of Kasch, a book that would become the first installment in an ambitious lifelong project meant to “unlock the mystical potential of ...
Noticing the Mothers of the Old Testament July 09, 2021
Why do we read anything? I can’t really answer that question. I don’t know why you are reading this and not something else, or why the other day I finally read Montaigne’s essay on thumbs, which had been recommended to me months ago. But I do know th...
What the Exodus Tells Us About Free Will March 27, 2021
In the story of Exodus, which recounts the Israelites’ flight to freedom, readers are told that the heart of the oppressive Pharaoh was “hardened.” With respect to the first five of the ten plagues inflicted upon Egypt, either the Pharaoh’s heart bec...
The Long March Through the Corporations March 27, 2021
That all cultural institutions in America have been taken over by the Left is beyond question. The media, the academy, Hollywood—all are now in its clutches. Conservatives still cling to talk radio, just as tightly as they do to their guns and bibles...
Why Read the Bible? March 19, 2021
Biblical scholarship in Europe and North America is in an unhealthy state. For two and a half centuries academic critics have purported to explain how biblical texts came about and therefore what “message” they conveyed. Since those texts couldn’t po...
Reading Jefferson's Bible October 16, 2020
Was thomas jefferson an atheist? Plenty of people thought so. Jefferson never identified himself as such, of course. But it was his microscopes, his French friends, his whole swinging, freethinking Enlightenment vibe … “I hope he is not an unbeliever...
