Saul The soul of the king an out-of-tune lyre with harpstrings for guts – many sharps and flats. Sent by the LORD the holy pneuma's hand scrapes unholy noise. It maddens the king with dissonant thought – the fatal vibration of blood in the heart until he is dead.

The Blinded Samson (1912) by Lovis Corinth Samson 1 The LORD is a living dread whose absence in Shiloh is more potent than his presence. Notwithstanding the regenerative Spirit whose intimate impulse is felt by the inner man, no angelic return or godly descent precedes the rousing motions of body and temple torn joint by joint. No use for Delphic oracle or word from Jerusalem. 2 Absorbed by the moon, the sun gives up its light, the stars their sweetness, and the sky is d

Thinking of Being without Heaviness or Depth Part 1: Being and heaviness People who suffer from depression often complain of a feeling of heaviness; not just in the emotional or mental sense, but as something physical — a visceral sensation pressing on the chest or wrapping itself around the body and the legs. Some sufferers say it is like having lead weights on their legs. Among the DSM-IV criteria for atypical depression is: “Leaden paralysis (i.e. heavy, leaden feelings i

Hermann Cohen and the Redemptive Potentiality of Sin Do I desire the death of the wicked? says the Lord God. Is it not rather in his repenting of his ways that he may live? […] Therefore, every man according to his ways I will judge you […] Cast away from yourselves all your transgressions whereby you have transgressed, and make yourselves a new heart and a new spirit, and why should you die […] For I do not desire the death of him who dies, says the Lord God: so turn away an

The Ethical Idealism and Prophetic Messianism of Hermann Cohen Hermann Cohen (1842 – 1918) was a German-Jewish philosopher, one of the founders of the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism and intellectual precursor to the 20th century Jewish existentialist humanism of Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas. Starting from the proposition that ethics had to be universal, Cohen outlined a Kantian (and non-Marxist) ethical socialism rooted in the prophetic vision of the

The Humanzee In the heat of a celluloid American night, Doctor Franklin Ahab — host to a crowd of forty souls — walks in a stately manner through the upper rooms of his Massachusetts mansion. He descends the wide staircase, smiling and reeling off witty one-liners. An orchestra plays The Rite of Spring in the enormous dining hall. For a few minutes Ahab casually mingles among his guests, then calls for the conductor to settle down. Hester, his life partner in a transparent d