Today is the Christian festival of Pentecost, and I’ve been working on what looks like it’ll be the final chapter in my Bible Babel book. The several different names for God that show up in the Bible — that’s what the chapter’s about. Although one could argue whether or not it belongs, I include the Spirit — Holy …
Hospitality in fierce climes is crucial. The hospitality of the desert is legendary, and several biblical stories hinge on it. Who knows, some suggest, but you might at any time be entertaining angels. Abraham and Sarah made a comfortable place for visitors, undercover messengers of God, who declared that the elderly Sarah will finally have …
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then what’s a picture with words worth? GQ recently published eleven cover pages from ealier Pentagon intelligence briefings. That they juxtapose biblical quotations with Iraq war photos has elicited all sorts of righteous indignation. Predictably, many people are outraged that Rumsfeld and Bush would blithely endorse equating …
Spoiler alert: If you haven’t yet seen Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino, don’t read any more here. Clint was all Clint in his latest, Gran Torino, but he did a mighty fine Jesus, too. I’m assuming, given the spoiler alert above, that you’ve already seen the movie. I loved it, especially for its ending. But of …
Ah, the stately cedars of Lebanon. They are celebrated in the Bible as the tree of choice for the great Jerusalem temple built by Solomon with the help of his Phoenician friend Hiram, the king of Tyre. Solomon’s own palace complex included “The House of the Forest of Lebanon” (1 Kings 7:2-5). So grand, these trees were the …
That bit about the lion lying down with the lamb isn’t actually in the Bible, not exactly, but never mind. It’s such an evocative image, and we all know what it means — peace, radical peace, serene and idyllic, right up there with beating swords into plowshares (which is in the Bible, twice for good …
