By Scott W. Hahn — Unlike the Noahic covenant, the Abrahamic covenant has always been a focus of scholarly attention. Perhaps the most important recent contribution is Paul R. Williamson’s monograph, Abraham, Israel and the Nations (2000). Williamson, a synchronic and narrative analyst, recognizes that at least two covenants between God and Abraham are
Patrick Modiano— At what point in my life did I meet Henri Marignan? Oh, I couldn’t have been twenty at the time. I think of him often. Sometimes he seems to have been one of my father’s multiple incarnations. I don’t know what became of him. Our first meeting? It
Máirtín Ó Cadhain— It was a ratty voice on the other end of the telephone, her sister calling from his house. ‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourself gallivanting around, and your wife just dead.’ ‘She is dead,’ N. said. ‘Yes.’ It was as much as he could think of saying. With
Terry Eagleton— One of the things we mean by calling a piece of writing ‘literary’ is that it is not tied to a specific context. It is true that all literary works arise from particular conditions. Jane Austen’s novels spring from the world of the English landed gentry of the
Omid Safi— Our modern word chemistry comes from the Arabic for alchemy, which is not a pseudoscience or primitive science but rather a recognition that all of the cosmos shares in the same ultimate substance. Alchemists knew that each of us have something in us that is base like lead;
Robert Skidelsky— Macroeconomics is about money and government, and their relationship. The unsettled questions in macroeconomic policy stem from disputes about the part money plays in economic life, and the part government should play. For 250 years, the dominant view of the economic profession has been that money is of
Silas Chamberlin— In the autumn of 1921, a small group of volunteers from the Palisades Interstate Park Conference assembled at dawn for a day of work in Harriman State Park, thirty miles north of New York City. It was a Sunday, a day of rest for most people, but these
Donna Hicks— I was in my office one afternoon, working on a project for an organization in Northern Ireland, when the phone rang. I picked it up, and on the other end of the line was a consultant who had been working for a major U.S. corporation for several years.
Micah Goodman— On the eve of the Six-Day War, Israel formed a national unity government (a broad coalition of all major parties) for the first time in its history. Faced with an acute military threat from the United Arab Republic (a union of Egypt and Syria), not only was Israel’s
Benjamin Ginsberg and Kathryn Wagner Hill— America’s congress is often castigated for being slow and unproductive, a victim of cumbersome procedures and partisan intransigence. One frequently cited book called Congress the “broken branch” of government. Another well-known volume, sharply critical of the Congress, called for “a new political order in