“It obliges me,” Mark Twain once said, “to renounce my allegiance to the Darwinian theory of the Ascent of Man…since it now seems plain to me,” he continued, “that that theory ought to be vacated in favor of a new and truer one…the Descent of Man.”[1] It is a biting wit typical of Twain, and, of […]

Betrayed first, he was then arrested and arraigned before Annas and Caiaphas. Denied by his disciples, he stands, in our brief gospel text, before Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judea, pagan ruler of the Jews and the embodiment of Roman power, inhuman and violent. The weak before the strong, the provincial preacher, now the silent lamb: Jesus […]