To prolong itself, the Protectorate needed Cromwell to be more of a Leviathan, more of a ruthless sovereign, than he could ever manage to stomach. This is both his exoneration and his failure.
The wearing of skullcaps in public was criminalised, as were other items defined as habitually Jewish. But Hasidic Jews responded by adopting the costume of the Polish-Russian merchant; the black fox-...
The shadows of woman and child lie heavily athwart our own fears and nightmares and the two become translated, in the empty, indifferent place, from the local to the monumental. They are nobodies and...
No, no, no, choose , More Marimondes thought. It wasn't that he disrespected the sacrifice of the martyr, but the simplicity of absolute ideals, across all religions, he found alien and disrespectful...
Likewise, Augustine made the effort of historical imagination to register to the full the Jewishness of Jesus and the apostles. And now, he wrote to Jerome in a series of subtly argued polemical excha...
A central fact, possibly central fact, about the Hebrew Bible is that it is not written at a moment of apogee, but over three centuries (eight to fifth) of trouble, That is what gives the Book its cu...
Sentinel
That the two religions were engaged in a contested Passover–Easter dialogue at this formative moment is not in doubt. Even after the Council of Nicaea in 325, with Constantine himself present, separat...
Asked what he thought was the significance of the French Revolution, the Chinese Premier Zhou En-lai is reported to have answered, It’s too soon to tell.
She had reached in her reading of Scott’s novel been chosen by Victoria as a literary valediction
The Archaeology of the Land of the Bible: An Introduction
The bulk of the Bible, from generation to generation, was written when the weaknesses of state power were most apparent. The portable scroll-book became the countervailing force to the sword. Once tha...