Ancient Hebrew Poetry

A Short Introduction to the Scholarship of Daniel Bodi

    There are three principal reasons why the scholarship of Daniel Bodi deserves to be better known. First of all, Bodi is not afraid to offer bold hypotheses, plough new ground, and make fresh connections. If only more biblical scholars fit this mold. Not all of Bodi’s hypotheses are convincing, but one is always grateful for the verve with which they are presented.

Covenant Prayer in the Style of John Wesley

    A Methodist tradition I cherish is the Watch Night service. It all began, as John Wesley recounts in his Short History of the People called Methodists (1781),¹ on the evening of August 11 1755 in the French church of Spitalfields in London (that is, in the "Old French Church" on Grey Eagle Street, which, after acquisition, became the base for Wesleyan expansion in London's East End). 1,800 people were in attendance. Huguenots whose ancestors had escaped France in the wake of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (Oct 22 1685) had built the chapel. Like the Huguenots who built the chapel, the early Methodists knew themselves to be pilgrims and strangers in a strange land. They were acutely aware that we have nothing on earth to call our own except the relationship we nurture with the good, the true, and the beautiful, a relationship they cultivated in the Christ of God encountered in worship and the preaching of the Word.

The Life and Death of Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)

    How shall we remember Christopher Hitchens? For his short-fused, slashing style? No one was more accomplished than he at firing rhetorical salvos at real or imaginary enemies. “Cry for Guatemala, with a corpse in every gate, if I had a rocket launcher, I would retaliate.” Whether or not Hitchens knew the lyrics of that Bruce Cockburn song, he agreed with them - more, I suspect, than Cockburn their author did. In the words of an ideology he never entirely relinquished, for Hitchens, “fascism means war” – which cuts both ways. It meant that Hitchens was anything but a pacifist.