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Jan 14, 2025 | 
jewishreviewofbooks.com | Malka Simkovich |Akiva Schick |Hillel Halkin |Yossi Shain
In the late third century BCE, a group of scholars working on a translation project in Egypt invented a Greek word that would change the course of Jewish—and arguably human— history. The project was to render the Hebrew Torah into Koine Greek. According to a second-century BCE novella called the Letter of Aristeas, the Egyptian pharaoh Ptolemy II Philadelphus (the son of Alexander the Great’s general) commissioned a Greek translation of the Torah for the royal library.
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Sep 29, 2024 | 
tabletmag.com | Malka Simkovich
Across the street from my house in Skokie, Illinois, is a small middle school in Evanston’s District 65. Since my family and I moved into our home six years ago, our relationship with the school has been quiet. On some mornings we exchange pleasantries with students and teachers passing by, but little more. In April 2024, however, two incidents pulled us into the school’s orbit. The first took place on the last day of Passover.
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Mar 18, 2024 | 
christiancentury.org | Yolanda Pierce |E. Heath |Malka Simkovich |Alejandra Oliva
What I remember is like a dream. I was visiting a friend years ago, around the time of an important saint’s day in her country, and her family decided that we would go to the saint’s shrine to see the festivities honoring her. We piled into their car after a hasty dinner and joined others streaming toward the basilica. The drive would have taken less than an hour any other day, but night fell around us and hours passed as traffic moved at a glacial crawl.
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Mar 18, 2024 | 
christiancentury.org | Yolanda Pierce |E. Heath |Malka Simkovich |Alejandra Oliva
Eleven years ago, The Hollywood Reporter hosted a roundtable to hype the Oscars. Somehow things got on to the topic of Holocaust movies, and Austrian director Michael Haneke called movies like Schindler’s List “unspeakable” because they make mass murder into entertainment: drama and resolution, suspense and catharsis, popcorn and candy.
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Mar 18, 2024 | 
christiancentury.org | Yolanda Pierce |E. Heath |Malka Simkovich |Alejandra Oliva
In ancient greek theories of vision, sight was about physical touch as much as visual perception. Extramission theories imagined the eye sending out beams of light or streams of fire to make contact with the world. Intromission theories suggested that every object emitted tiny replicas of itself, or constantly shed minute particles like a snake sheds its skin, and that these replicas or particles entered into the eye.
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Mar 15, 2024 | 
christiancentury.org | E. Heath |Yolanda Pierce |Malka Simkovich
To receive these posts by email each Monday, sign up. For more commentary on this week's readings, see the Reflections on the Lectionary page. For full-text access to all articles, subscribe to the Century. In my Century lectionary column for this Sunday, I talk about the plaque in my seminary’s chapel that sits just below the pulpit.
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Mar 15, 2024 | 
christiancentury.org | Yolanda Pierce |E. Heath |Malka Simkovich |Brian Bantum
I have been a Christian for over 30 years. Most days I still feel a lot like that skinny 15-year-old who was lost in the world only to be found by God, by a people. And though that feeling of a thin veil between me and the world still seems to slip up and down, I left that Southern Baptist Church and its theology a long time ago. There was no singular trauma or betrayal that led me away from the evangelical nest.
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Mar 14, 2024 | 
christiancentury.org | George M. Marsden |Yolanda Pierce |Malka Simkovich |E. Heath
The modern revival of interest in the Puritan pastor-philosopher Jonathan Edwards began with historian Perry Miller’s 1949 biography. In Miller’s telling, Edwards was a solitary genius in the wilderness. While still a teenager, he was the only American to read and comprehend the revolutionary insights of John Locke and Isaac Newton.
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Mar 14, 2024 | 
christiancentury.org | Yolanda Pierce |Malka Simkovich |E. Heath |Randall Balmer
“Reality had little weight in his transcendence,” wrote poet A. R. Ammons, “so he / had trouble keeping / his feet on the ground.” I couldn’t help but think of these lines from “He Held Radical Light” as I watched Wonka, a musical origin story of the self-described “magician, inventor, and chocolate maker” Willy Wonka.
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Mar 14, 2024 | 
christiancentury.org | Yolanda Pierce |Malka Simkovich |E. Heath |Randall Balmer
When I first walked into Letha Dawson Scanzoni’s apartment—which was, principally, a working office—I was astounded by how many books she’d packed into the floor-to-ceiling bookcases that lined all four walls of her small living room. I had traveled from Texas to her home in Norfolk, Virginia, to become better acquainted with the influential evangelical writer.
