Here in my third post on Esau McCaulley’s book, Reading While Black, I’m going to look at Chapter 4, “Reading While Black—The Bible and the Pursuit of Justice,” and Chapter 5, “Black and Proud—The Bible and Black Identity.” Chapter 4: “Reading While Black—The Bible and the Pursuit of Justice”McCaulley begins this chapter by recalling the…
Here in my second post on Esau McCaulley’s book, Reading While Black, I am going to provide an overview chapters 2 and 3. Chapter 2 is entitled, “Freedom is No Fear: The New Testament and a Theology of Policing,” and Chapter 3 is entitled, “Tired Feet, Rested Souls: The New Testament and the Political Witness…
Last fall, Esau McCaulley, an assistant professor of New Testament at Wheaton College, came out with his book, Reading While Black: An African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope. To be honest, even though I bought it soon after it came out, it had remained on my desk, unread for a while. Part…
Rhapsody on a Windy Night has always been one of my favorite poems by T.S. Eliot. In many ways, it is one of the easiest to read and understand. As the title suggests, the setting of the poem takes place in one night, from the time of midnight to four in the morning. It is…
T.S. Eliot’s poem Portrait of a Lady was first published in 1917, in Eliot’s book of poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations. The poem is about guilt and broken relationships, and in the course of the poem, there are essentially three voices: (a) the man and his “inner voice,” (b) the man and his “outer mask”…
It really says something about how difficult T.S. Eliot’s poetry can be when the one, if not only, poem almost every high school English Literature curriculum has of Eliot’s is The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. That poem, among all the poetry of Eliot, is evidently considered to be the easiest—and it isn’t that…
Little Gidding is the fourth and final poem in T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Written in 1942, it essentially signaled the end of Eliot’s public career as a poet. Little Gidding is actually a village in Huntingdonshire. In that village, there is a chapel that serves as the geographical focus of the poem. Whereas Burnt Norton…
Dry Salvages is the third poem in T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. It is the only poem of the Four Quartets that includes an introductory note to tell us that the Dry Salvages is actually a small group of rocks with a beacon off the northeast coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts. This is important to know…
Over the past five years or so, I’ve written quite a lot about the creation/evolution debate, particularly on the misinterpretation of Genesis 1-11 by young earth creationist organizations like Answers in Genesis, and for a lot of concordist interpretations of Genesis 1-11. Simply put, Genesis 1-11 isn’t addressing modern scientific issues at all. Genesis 1-11…
East Coker is the second poem in T.S. Eliot’s masterpiece, Four Quartets. East Coker is the actual village in Somersetshire, England from which Eliot’s ancestor, Andrew Eliot, set out for America in the 17th century. The poem East Coker, though, is a contemplation of the passage of time, felt primarily by an individual who is…