As a schoolboy, poetry seemed defined by preciousness. It was all very rarefied.
Sculptures created from found materials like ice and thorns, driftwood, and even bleached kangaroo bones all presuppose that artistic design will yield to the cycles of time and climate, whether over...
„Rozbójnicy i „bandyci to terminy od dawna stosowane przez bogatych (do których z pewnością zaliczał się Józef [Flawiusz]) na określenie buntowników spośród obciążonych podatkami i zubożałych.
In Mesopotamia or Egypt, for example, the monarch had a god-like religious status. But this is not the case in Judaism. So that notion that religion can go on, when all the markers of power and trappi...
The Elephantine papyri - written as some of the books of the Bible are being written - is true social and legal documentation, and to historians overwhelmingly powerful and moving, even when ostensibl...
History gives you insight of the same quality of truth as poetry or philosophy or a novel.
Historians like a quiet life, and usually they get it. For the most part, history moves at a deliberate pace, working its changes subtly and incrementally. Nations and their institutions harden into s...
The challenge for a nonfiction writer is to achieve a poetic precision using the documents of truth but somehow to make people and places spring to life as if the reader was in their presence.
Even for the most excitable preacher, there was nothing sinful about a waffle.
The Torah, then, was compact, transferable history, law, wisdom, poetic chant, prophecy, consolation and self-strengthening counsel. Just as the sanctuary could be erected in safety and dismantled in...
An ox carcass by Rembrandt seems so utterly butchered as to be agonisingly still alive. A
Somehow, the words don't have any vitality, any life to them, unless I can feel it marking on a paper. That's how I start. Once I'm off, then I switch to the laptop. I think it would all just be prose...
Since there was little or nothing in Jesus' own reported teachings which required the repudiation of the Torah, it was possible to be a Jewish Christian, and considerable numbers in the first generati...
I actually think that history has fed off the restlessness of cyber space, of kind of the frantic, segmented nature of the way we lead our lives. People want to be connected.
Question, albeit speculative, won’t go away. No scholar quarrels with the archaic antiquity of the earliest elements of the Hebrew Bible: the Song of the Sea and of Moses. A strong consensus exists th...
He was also deemed an irreproachable holy man who had returned to Antioch only when a life of self-mortification threatened to kill him should he persist with it. John had work to do: the most urgent...
The Almoravids yielded to the madder fury of the Almohades and the days of worldly accommodation in Al-Andalus passed for good.
God is the finger; God is writing; God, is above all else, words.
The difficulty with poetry is that it doesn't have the life that Shakespeare or Jane Austen have beyond the page. You can't make a costume drama out of it. There's no place for it to go except trapped...
A young student had written to his father, justifying his decision to volunteer by declaring that our liberty can only be assured if it will have for its bed a mattress of cadavers… I consent to becom...