Göran Eidevall— According to a popular theory, the most prominent representatives of the prophetic movement in ancient Israel and Judah were radically anti-cultic. Many scholars have claimed that the so-called classical prophets—in the first place, Hosea, Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah—denounced animal sacrifice as a primitive ritual, practiced by neighboring peoples.
Philippe-Joseph Salazar— Security agencies fail us each time a terror attack takes place –while their collective failure to act on intelligence is balanced by the personal bravery of citizens, first responders, and police. But there is a worse failure, which goes unnoticed in the outpouring of emotions, denunciations and verbal
David Bentley Hart— When I came to the task of producing my own translation of the New Testament, I knew that there are certain words and phrases in the text that present special difficulties, and that no solution I chose would please everybody. In some cases, the difficulty lies in
Helen Fry— Writing the history of spies, espionage and the intelligence services, especially MI6 or the CIA, poses its own particular challenges. Secret intelligence organisations are shrouded in myth and mystery, often self-created, and that attracts a certain public curiosity. How far historians can reconstruct the full truth is an
Philippe-Joseph Salazar— One year ago an off-beat play about terrorism by Nobel-prize laureate Elfriede Jelinek premièred in Darmstadt, Germany, Wut (Rage) – at a time the country was straining both under a messy immigration often from countries who are suppliers of jihadists, and terror attacks often presented by the police as
James A. W. Heffernan— Fifteen months ago, the Salzburg Festival first staged an opera that has just opened at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York: Thomas Adès’s The Exterminating Angel. Based on Luis Buñuel’s 1962 film of that title, the opera tells the story of a lavish dinner party
Joshua Rubenstein— The romantic figure of Leon Trotsky, a man who helped lead the Bolsheviks to power a hundred years ago and then came to embody defiance of Joseph Stalin, continues to haunt our imagination. He joined the Bolsheviks as an outspoken teenager, then endured arrest and Siberian exile before
Tarek Osman— Arab Islamism has always tried to design the future in the image of the past. The Islamists have repeatedly tried to impose their own interpretations of certain episodes in Islamic history upon how their societies should live in the present. The approach might have had some merit when
On this special Halloween edition of the podcast, cultural historian Leo Braudy, author of Haunted, sat down with us to talk about the history of monsters and other scary creatures. Spooky!
Leslie Anthony— Life on our planet is changing, of that there can be no doubt. That alien invasive species are a measurable component of this is also clear. The questions raised, then, are simple, and essentially those we began with: do we care about this? And if so, what are