Sherlock’s Soap-Operization

Last updated on: January 20, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Nicholas Barber gets Sherlock just right. Benedict Cumberbatch has the intensity to kill the title role, and, puppyish though he is, Martin Freeman’s Dr. Watson is a credible sidekick. The production is slick, the characters compelling, the rapport sharp and often witty. It’s hugely entertaining. Then they go and turn it into a soap opera. Barber: “There were an exciting few minutes during this week’s episode of the BBC’s ‘Sherlock’ when it looked as if Sherlock Holmes was getting on... Read more

Are Trinitarian Persons Persons?

Last updated on: January 19, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

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Boethius defined persona as an “individual substance of a rational nature (natuae rationalis individua substantia). This definition is often cited as evidence that medieval Trinitarian theology, deeply influenced by Boethius, did not teach that the Trinitarian “Persons” are persons in the modern sense of the term – that is, not self-conscious centers of will, intention, and activity. For Boethius, “person” has a more (even merely) formal connotation. To say the Three are Persons means only that they are individual instances... Read more

David’s Plunder

Last updated on: January 19, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

David is no Achan. Achan was the Judahite who seized plunder from Jericho, booty that belonged to Yahweh. Achan’s sacrilege led to a disastrous defeat at Ai, which was erased only after Joshua executed Achan and his complicit family (Joshua 7; 1 Chronicles 2:7). David is no Achan. When he conquers Gentiles and seizes armor and treasure, he sends it back to Jerusalem, to Yahweh (1 Chronicles 18:7-1, 11). The Chronicler’s account of David’s wars (1 Chronicles 18-20) contains a... Read more

Justice and Righteousness

Last updated on: January 18, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Nestled within several chapters of 1 Chronicles that describe David’s wars, 1 Chronicles 18:14–17 explains the purpose of those wars: To establish Yahweh’s order of justice in Israel, an order of justice that David himself administers and mediates. Having conquered Philistia, Moab, Ammon, and Edom, David reigns over “all Israel” (v. 14) and his reign is a righteous one. Justice and righteousness mean conformity to Torah. David fought obediently, refusing to lay hands on plunder (18:8; cf. 1 Chronicles 2:17)... Read more

Anthropomorphism and Nature

Last updated on: January 17, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In his Essays in Anthropology, Robert Spaemann observes that “the beginning of modern science was marked by polemics against the concept of nature. The concept of nature is now taken to be anthropomorphic, while the essentially teleological idea of things in the cosmos having ‘movement in themselves’ is understood as the usurpation of a divine quality” (9). Teleology was anthropomorphism because it was considered a “projection” of human will and decision and purpose onto a natural order that, by the... Read more

God’s Sacramental Self-Gift

Last updated on: January 17, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

What does God give in creation and redemption? He gives us our own existence, and that the gift He gives is Himself. Both are true. Luther captures this latter point in his 1528 “Confession”: “These are the three Persons and the one God, Who has given Himself to us wholly with all that He is and all that He has. The Father gives Himself to us, with heaven and earth and all created things, that they may be profitable and... Read more

American Covenant

Last updated on: January 16, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Philip Gorski’s American Covenant examines the American tradition of civil religion or civic republicanism from the Puritans through President Obama. Gorski contrasts this tradition with the two most belligerent contenders in contemporary American politics, religious nationalism and radical secularism. Civil religion differs from radical secularism in its anthropology (communitarian rather than individualist) and its comfort with religion in public life (against secular “separationism,” civil religion recognizes an unavoidable overlap of religion and politics). It differs from religious nationalism in its... Read more

Caldwell on America’s Fighting Faith

Last updated on: January 13, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Christopher Caldwell’s review of Walter McDougall’s The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy is sooo good. McDougall explains (as his subtitle has it) “How America’s Civil Religion Betrayed the National Interest.” That betrayal arises from several sources. One is the vagueness of American civil religion, which means, Caldwell says, that it “is easily molded to intellectual fads and passing political agendas. McDougall calls it ‘a mystical, magical, shape-shifting civil religion whose orthodoxies can turn into heresies and whose heresies can turn... Read more

Decolonized World

Last updated on: January 13, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In their just-released Decolonization: A Short History, Jan Jansen and Jurgen Osterhammel observe that decolonization not only remade the maps of former colonies, but also involved the “Europeanization of Europe” and produced changes in political norms and expectations. “Decolonization,” they write “led to ‘Europe falling back on itself,’ altered the position of the continent in the international power structure, and interacted with the supranational integration of Europe’s nation-states, which reached its first culmination in 1957 with the establishment of the... Read more

Hope in the Hinterlands

Last updated on: January 13, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

James Fallows summarizes his findings from a period of travel around the US. It’s good news: Erie, Pennsylvania, has a landscape of abandoned factory buildings and a generation of laid-off blue-collar workers who know that their children will never enjoy the security they did at the once-mighty GE locomotive plant. (Those GE jobs, by the way, are moving not to China or Mexico but instead to Fort Worth, Texas.) But Erie also has as active a civic-reform movement as you... Read more

What was Jesus nailed to?