Loss acquires meaning and generates recovery.1

I have done much rebuilding. To reconstruct is to collaborate with time gone by, penetrating or modifying its spirit, and carrying it toward a longer future.2

Many religious traditions attempt to regulate the sexual practices of their members. Generally, their main tool for doing so is prescribing with whom one may or may not have intimate relations. Forbidden partners might include, for example, members of the same sex, relatives, or people of other religious and ethnic groups. Additional methods for defining how and when intimate relations are permissible are also not unheard of. For example, sexual relations using certain positions or occurring on certain days or hours or in certain places might be declared sinful. The three main Bible-related religious traditions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, all have in their toolboxes these various regulatory instruments; many other religious groups use them as well.

The American Puritan layman Samuel Sewall (d. 1730) is perhaps best known as a diarist and as a repentant judge in the Salem witchcraft trials. But he was also the author of Phaenomena quaedam apocalyptica (first edition 1697), a work which argued that the New Jerusalem would arise in Mexico City. Sewall’s unusual millennial doctrine may seem undeserving of study, for no other American Puritan thought that the New Jerusalem would first appear in Mexico City or anywhere else in New Spain. Yet when properly contextualized, the Mexican millennium is worth investigating for two reasons. First, it accentuates what the American Puritan millenarian mainstream, best exemplified by John Cotton, Increase Mather, and Cotton Mather, believed about the coming kingdom. Second, the Mexican millennium, like the mainstream position, challenges the academic claim that American Puritan millenarians characteristically believed that they were destined to inaugurate the millennial kingdom in New England.

Toward the end of his nine-year tenure as Fellow, Thomas Hooker awoke in his sleeping quarters at Emmanuel College terrified by a sense of “the Just Wrath of Heaven.” His God, the same God in whom he had always put his trust, had turned against him and was furious at his sinfulness. Dreading divine punishment, Hooker found himself “fill'd. . . with most unusual Degrees of Horror and Anguish.” Alone in the night, Hooker was haunted by the anger of a terrifying God.

The study explores the character and meaning of the imagery of the kiss in the Zohar as an expression of dynamic union. In order to demonstrate the formation of a specific structure of ideas and their dynamics within Kabbalistic theosophy, the Zoharic imagery found in the pericope Terumah has been situated here within the context of numerous sources, from which the Zohar, through direct or indirect transmission, could have drawn its key elements. The metaphor of the kiss, which allows the Zoharic homily to embrace several central Kabbalistic concepts of love, presents love as a universal power, being comprised of two Neoplatonic notions, the hypostatic relation and the principle of “being contained in each other.” The analysis of the various sources across ancient Greek, medieval Islamic, and Christian traditions amounts to a different characterization of the meaning adduced thus far in scholarship regarding eros in Jewish mysticism and suggests a more plausible trajectory of influence of Greek sources in the early Kabbalah.

One of the strangest texts to be included in recent collections of biblical pseudepigrapha is that known as the Ladder of Jacob. Known only from the Slavonic Tolkovaya Paleya, this text elaborates on the story of Jacob's dream at Bethel in Gen 28:11–22, adding details to the vision described there and containing a prayer and angelic revelation nowhere present in the biblical narrative. It is clear that the Slavonic text is a translation from Greek; it appears likely to me that the Greek is itself a translation from an original Aramaic or Hebrew text dating from, roughly speaking, the Second Temple period.

If we speak here of contemporary literature, let us nevertheless recall that in all ages men have recorded certain common responses to death and mortality that vary little. The universal themes of dread and stupor, of grief and compunction, of transience and corruptibility — such poignancies of our finite condition underlie whatever special cultural or even religious influences come into play, or whatever particular hopes are projected. It is for this reason that elegies for fallen heroes and laments for toppled cities and broken hopes, in Job or Homer, are still moving, or the heartbreak in a papyrus letter, or the plangent grief of Catullus as he comes across many seas to his brother's grave,

ut te postremo donarem munere mortis

et mutam nequiquam adloquerer cinerem.

Indeed, we must say that it is only in total openness to such common experience of grief and trepidation that other more positive overtones of death can make themselves felt and justify themselves.

To the very title of this paper, or at any rate to the idea implied in it, the average religious thinker might conceivably make more objections than one. He might in the first place inquire whether any meaning can be found in the term “rational mysticism”; and, examining it either from the standpoint of reason or from that of mysticism, might complain that it attempts to bring together two quite incompatible things. Reason has usually held mysticism in scorn, looking upon it as a sort of quack method, if the word may pass, of accomplishing, or of pretending to accomplish, what reason accomplishes in the professional and only legitimate way. Mysticism, from the other side, has been ready enough to repay scorn with scorn: it has claimed to find its way to the secret places of truth by a subtle process far more efficacious than that laborious following of the trail which reason practises; and its independence of reason, its irreconcilability with reason, it has always taken as its glory rather than its shame. What—the average religious man might say—what can “rational mysticism” mean? How, indeed, can such a thing exist at all? And in the next place, even supposing you could manufacture the curious compound that “rational mysticism” would be, and could link the two seeming incompatibles together, how are you going to make any connection between your newly created rational mysticism and New Testament Christianity? Rational, indeed, New Testament Christianity is, or claims to be; and to show its harmony with reason (provided that the thing be not pushed too far) is one of the chief objects that Christian apologetics may well keep in view.

Professor Abraham has given us a stimulating paper on the central and prophetic nature of revelation. I thank him for it. Several years ago at a meeting of a theological society Professor Gabriel Fackre gently chided David Tracy and myself by asking: “Why do Roman Catholic theologians neglect the work of Evangelical theologians?” This neglect was regrettable, he suggested, for Evangelical Christians and Roman Catholics have much in common theologically. Moreover, although they are numerically very large denominations in society, they both share a certain minority status in the academic community. They should, therefore, pay attention to one another's writings. His admonition has weighed heavily upon me.

A remarkable phenomenon in African Christianity occurred between about 1912 and 1930 when, mostly out of the ferment of indigenous reaction to Western Christian missions, local “prophets” emerged and founded African Independent Churches. “Independency” is the term employed to characterize this phenomenon which came to embrace both the charismatic prophet figures and the separatist churches they or their followers created. Over six thousand such movements were identified throughout Africa in 1968, with the situation still in considerable flux. By the end of the twentieth century it is estimated that some 350 million Africans will have converted to one form or another of the various types of Christian practice now active on the continent.

Perhaps the most remarkable collection of autograph letters in the world is that made by the late Frederic A. Dreer and now housed in the Pennsylvania Historical Society at 1300 Locust Street, Philadelphia. Among the several thousand letters, there are specimens of the writing of most of the famous people who have lived during the last four centuries. During various short visits at Philadelphia I have run through the whole collection and have copied fifty of the most important epistles written during the period before 1650. For, to my great surprise, a number of the most valuable have lain for all these centuries unknown.

For many years now, it has become very common for Old Testament scholars to refer to the numerous parallels between the patriarchal customs reflected in the stories of Genesis and the Custom law of the cuneiform documents of the second millennium B.C. Particular attention has been given to the Nuzi texts and to custom law related to marriage. The present study is directed to a reexamination of the parallels to marriage customs as they have been applied to the story of Jacob's marriage to the daughters of Laban.

The article in the April, 1941 number of the REVIEW on The Epitaph of Julius Terentius by C. B. Welles, and the following Postscript by A. D. Nock, are of great interest for their presentation of Graeco-Roman thought on the state of departed souls. The writer would note some scanty correspondences from the Oriental field.

In 1791, when he was eighteen years of age, Coleridge came across Burke's A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Although he was sufficiently interested to read the essay, he was not impressed by it. In fact, if one is to judge his reaction by the jeu d'esprit, “Mathematical Problem,” it was chiefly one of amusement. Although he went on to read Burke's other essays, he was attracted by the character of the author and the style of his writing rather than by his point of view; for, certainly a young man who was an avowed disciple of David Hartley, a champion of the French Revolution, and the originator of Pantisocracy could find little comfort in the works of Edmund Burke. But the zeal for Hartley, the French Revolution, and Pantisocracy was short-lived; and by 1796 Coleridge had turned, a “thought-bewilder'd man,” to a reading of Bishop Berkeley.The influence of Berkeley, especially of the later Platonic Berkeley, began to show in his work almost at once; the influence of Burke continued to lag. Out of his reflections on Berkeley, however, came a new admiration for Burke, particularly for his Philosophical Inquiry; and, from the combined teachings of the two, Coleridge ultimately derived suggestions for a theology broad enough to account for and to give meaning and purpose to all human activities. I should like here to indicate briefly the use he made of these suggestions with respect to science, philosophy, and poetry. I do not mean to imply that there were no other influences at work in the formulation of his views; but I do submit that these two influences are basic and that Coleridge's position can be adequately understood only in terms of them.

A Puritan sloth is as hard to imagine as a Puritan humorist. The Saints have been called many things since the sixteenth century, but seldom if ever have they been accounted lazy. From Ben Jonson's caustic caricature of Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, ready to intrude his opinions on any subject, to Michael Walzer's portrayal of them as the indefatigable pioneers of modern radical politics, observers have readily acknowledged their “extraordinary activism.” To link this enterprise with the ethic of striving that lay at the heart of Puritan thought is easy, for the preachers always spoke of the godly life as arduous. “I say shew your grace, shew your regeneration, by being new creatures, by doing more than others,” John Preston urged, and he practiced what he preached. Chaplain to Charles I, Master of Emmanuel College at Cambridge, participant in Puritan Parliamentary politics while commuting between lectureships at both Lincoln's Inn and Trinity Church in Cambridge, Preston forced several careers into the less than two decades between his conversion and his death at the age of forty from consumption probably exacerbated by exhaustion. “[H]e never (by his good will) rested that day since God was truly known unto him untill [his death],” wrote his first biographer, “God gave him therefore now an everlasting rest.” Few people more fully exemplified the Puritan ideal that pious performance is the thanksgiving for the gift of eternal life.

Eloisa, the medieval nun torn between “grace and nature” in Alexander Pope's Eloisa to Abelard, has proved to be one of the poet's most fascinating and popular female creations among religious scholars as well as literary critics. Yet there appears in Pope's masterpiece another female figure who has been largely ignored and whose nature and function in the poem have never been accurately described. In the midst of Eloisa's spiritual and emotional conflict between her carnal memories of Abelard and her religious obligations as a nun, she imagines that she sees sitting in front of her the figure of “Black Melancholy,” a woman spreading spiritual gloom over the entire scene:

But o'er the twilight groves, and dusky caves,

Long-sounding isles, and intermingled graves,

Black Melancholy sits, and round her throws

A death-like silence, and a dread repose;

Her gloomy presence saddens all the scene,

Shades ev'ry flow'r, and darkens ev'ry green,

Deepens the murmur of the falling floods,

And breathes a browner horror on the woods.

You may have heard of the Blessed Mountain.It is the highest mountain in our world.Should you reach the summit you would have only one desire,and that to descend and be with those who dwell in the deepest valley.That is why it is called the Blessed Mountain.Kahlil Gibran, Sand and Foam