Has The Whole World Been Blessed?
Let’s start where the story starts. Abram is living in Ur of the Chaldees when, without explanation or preamble, God – the God of history – says…
How to Live One’s Story
When I’ve talked about the need to defend one’s story, I’ve had in mind my experience that ill-wishers can show astonishing astuteness in picking out key elements…
Who Owns the Timeline? Covenant in Buber, Voegelin, and Ourselves
*Note: This was originally a paper presented at the 2023 APSA When we talk of living in history, what are we saying? Eric Voegelin credits the…
Why Choose the Jews?
It feels like forever – so changed are the times! – but it’s only been two days at this writing. Starting in the early hours of October…
A Special Covenant
This is a deliberately big book, 585 pages of text, with nearly a hundred more pages of notes and index. Its ambition is also huge: to present…
Must Our Stories Come Out Right?
In my passage from childhood to young girlhood, there were two stories I relied on for clues about the life that lay ahead of me. The first…
The Cult of Woke
Sometimes I imagine the following scene: I am seated at a sidewalk café in D.C., having dinner with a friend. Suddenly a troop of Wokesters show up. …
An Argument in the Metaxy: Lionel Trilling and Henry Rosenthal
For Eric Voegelin, the realm of the “in-between” is humanity’s proper habitat. Temptations to depart this realm, which may be termed the historical condition, come at us…
Putting Order into History
Aviva Zornberg has written another of her inspired books about the Bible, this one suggestively titled, The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis. Why read the Bible? …
Rachel at the Well and Jane Eyre
Some years ago, Jerry and I had dinner in Washington D.C. with a learned and accomplished professorial couple who’d been married and deeply in love for their…
As If We Are Free
We are just back from the pleasant French city of Montreal in Canada, where Jerry and I gave papers and attended the presentations of others at the…
No Place Like Home
My name Abigail means in Hebrew “father’s joy.” Which tells us that, at birth, I’d already received my assignment. Since my father was considered, by a number…
Desire and Defamation
Defamation tends to obliterate the erotic appeal of the person being defamed. That’s one reason it’s so infuriatingly irreparable. It makes the victim seem undesirable. We are…
What’s Unconscious?
In recent columns, I’ve written about the mysterious effects of mind on body and their unpredictable intertwinings. One reader has left Comments on these columns, twice urging…
My Mind is Not My Brain
How much hangs on that denial – or on its contradictory, that my mind is my brain! If our minds are our brains, as I once thought,…