This paper looks at two thirteenth century accounts, the Itinerarium by the Franciscan William of Rubruck and the Syriac Church of the East text Tashīthā DemārYaballāhā (the History of Mar Yaball...Read More
For Part I of this series, click here; for Part II, click here; for Part III, click here; for Part IV, click here. If Stephen Marshall’s literalism makes his reading of Psalm 137 easy to interpret a...Read More
If the title of this blog entry led you to believe that its purpose is to criticize theology, you would be correct. As used here, ‘Freaking’ is not an adjective, not a clean version of the ‘F’...Read More
As the cases of Digby and Smectymnuus illustrate, the Israel/Edom metaphor does not readily admit of middle ground. Indeed, in a famous sermon given on the occasion of a Parliamentary fast day on 23 F...Read More
The invocations of Psalm 137 got uglier when Hall addressed a new tract to Parliament in the wake of the Root and Branch Petition. This tract drew responses from adversaries in his first category, the...Read More
Like Jacob and Esau after the episode of the pottage, the family relationship of the English Church had gone quite sour by 1640, and this bitterness gave Psalm 137 its potency in the church-government...Read More
7 Remember the children of Edom, O Lord, in the day of Jerusalem: how they said, Down with it, down with it, even to the ground. 8 O daughter of Babylon, wasted with misery: yea, happy shall he be tha...Read More
This post originally appeared on The Huffington Post Religion. In a post this week, Taylor Burton-Edwards, Director of Worship Resources of the General Board of Discipleship — a national organiz...Read More
I was walking down the crowded, cobblestoned streets of Jerusalem’s Old City when a bearded man with narrow eyes reached out his hand and tried to grab my breast. I did not know him. I had not...Read More
I tend to think of Buddhist practice as a way of cultivating a mind so stable that such storms leave it unscathed, and I often judge myself harshly when I fail to live up to that standard—when the s...Read More