Sincerity or Ritual

Last updated on: December 15, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

The authors of Ritual and its Consequences (104–6) note a contrast between civilizations that are bound by authoritative rituals and those that are not. The latter are deeply concerned with sincerity: “Civilizations or movements with a diminished concern for ritual have an overwhelming concern with sincerity, which we can see in forms as widely varied as those Puritan sermons and the Buddhist concern with uncovering the Buddha nature hidden within each of us. In some sense, then, sincerity works as... Read more

Sincerity or Ritual

Last updated on: December 15, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

My Bright Abyss

Last updated on: December 15, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

One paragraph illustrates both the reasons I admire Christian Wiman’s 2013 searingly honest My Bright Abyss, and the reasons I find the book frustrating to the point of irritation. A poet and erstwhile editor of Poetry, Wiman came to Christianity as an adult in the midst of an excruciating and incurable cancer of the blood. His suffering has naturally left a profound mark on the shape of his faith: I’m a Christian not because of the resurrection (I wrestle with... Read more

Prehistory of “Priestcraft”

Last updated on: December 14, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

“Priestcraft” was one of the charges regularly lodged by skeptics against clergy and theologians in early modern Europe. It connoted obscurantism, deception, manipulation of popular opinion. It connoted everything wrong with established Christianity, especially in its more catholic manifestations. Not all the charges of “priestcraft” were directed at clergy. Lawyers and doctors were also attacked for their monopolies of expertise, undergirded by specialized language unintelligible to non-experts. “Lay” came to be used in contrast not only to “clergy” but to... Read more

The American Religion of Psychology

Last updated on: December 13, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Keith G. Meador devotes his contribution to The Secular Revolution to an analysis of the therapeutic takeover of American Protestantism. He focuses on the role of the Christian Century under the editorship of Charles Clayton Morrison, who used the magazine to advance a “scientific” and simplified Christianity supposedly fit for the modern age. Psychology played a major role in this reform. By the 1920s, partly through the Century‘s influence, “mainline Protestant seminaries began teaching the concept of ‘self-realization,’ which conceived... Read more

Secularization

Last updated on: December 13, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

One of the virtues of Anthony J. Carroll’s Protestant Modernity is his effort to put flesh on the bony term “secularization,” often batted about in an airily sociological fashion. On-the-ground secularization is easiest to spot in Revolutionary France, when institutions and personnel and property and records were removed from the church’s jurisdiction and resettled into the jurisdiction of the state. For instance, by Article X of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789), “The French Revolution... Read more

Augustinian Optimism and Modern Science

Last updated on: December 12, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Peter Harrison points out in his The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (10–11) that the Reformation coincided with the rediscovery of ancient skepticism. While the Reformers were undermining traditional Catholic sources of authority from one side, Montaigne and others were corroding certainty from the other. Descartes took this skepticism as a starting point to reconstruct the foundations for knowledge. This is the thesis of Richard Popkin, and not far from Harrison’s own thesis. But Harrison thinks another... Read more

Augustinian Optimism and Modern Science

Last updated on: December 12, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Monstrous Revelations

Last updated on: December 9, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Near the beginning of his Religion and its Monsters, Timothy Beal points to the etymological hint that monsters might have some inherent connection to religion: “the monster’s religious import is rooted in the word itself: ‘monster’ derives from the Latin monstrum, which is related to the verbs monstrare (‘show’ or ‘reveal’) and monere (‘warn’ or ‘portend’), and which sometimes refers to a divine portent that reveals the will or judgment of God or the gods. In this sense a monstrum... Read more

Post-Enlightenment Apocalyptic

Last updated on: December 9, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

According to Cyril O’Regan, von Balthasar saw Hegel and Heidegger as the great exemplars of post-Enlightenment mis-remembering (Anatomy of Misremembering). Misremembering is not the same as forgetting. To misremember involves a will to overcome forgetfulness, but at the same time distorts what is remembered. Misremembering overcomes amnesia, but overcomes it wrongly. Hegel’s philosophy is a massive effort to overcome Enlightenment amnesia, one that “promises an alternative form of thought which is a singularly powerful system of ‘recollection’ (Erinnerung) in which... Read more

Which book is the largest by chapters in the Bible?