Making vows to the Lord was a common practice in the Old Testament. In the Bible, vow specifically means “conditional vow”—that is, a promise to make some offering to God if He would grant some specific request. These are distinguished from the kinds of vows we usually think of: unconditional promises like vows of matrimony or monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, which would have been called “oaths” in biblical language.…
Although far removed from the ancient reality of sacrifice, the modern idea of a soldier’s sacrifice for his or her country can be a beautiful testament to courage, self-denial, and love of others. However, like everything in this world, it can also be turned to darker purposes. In particular, the rhetoric of sacrifice can be used to glorify war and thus justify the gruesome cost of political decisions. An example of this…
In the Marvel television series Hawkeye (a spinoff of the Avengers movies), a young woman named Kate Bishop is drawn by fate to meet her idol, Clint Barton, a.k.a. Hawkeye. As a child she had witnessed him repel an alien assault from the roof of a New York City skyscraper armed only with a bow and arrows (as improbable as that may sound). Since then, she trained to be like him, acquiring…
