“Natural” architecture

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:45 pm By Peter Leithart

In an overview of the architectural work of Santiago Calatrava, Sara Williams Goldhagen (TNR January 23) cautions against the chimera of architecture grounded in “nature”: “Maybe the first architects needed to pay obeisance to nature’s designs, but that primal moment is long gone. Architecture – and ‘nature’ too – is a human construct. Whether or not designers need to acknowledge their buildings’ physical and material properties (and for reasons too complex to lay out here, I believe they do), they... Read more

Sermon Outline, Fourth Epiphany

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:01 am By Peter Leithart

INTRODUCTION Solomon ends Ecclesiastes where he began, by emphasizing our lack of control (11:5) and the brevity of life (12:1-8). Wisdom means adjusting our actions and expectations to these realities. THE TEXT “Cast your bread upon the waters, for you will find it after many days. Give a serving to seven, and also to eight, for you do not know what evil will be on the earth. If the clouds are full of rain, they empty themselves upon the earth;... Read more

Eucharistic meditation, Third Epiphany

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:39 pm By Peter Leithart

Ecclesiastes 4:1: Then I returned and considered all the oppression that is done under the sun: And look! The tears of the oppressed, but they have no comforter— on the side of their oppressors there is power, but they have no comforter. The great evil that Solomon describes here is not merely the reality of oppression, not merely the fact that oppressors hold all the cards, but that the oppressed have no assistance, no comfort, no deliverer. He repeats the... Read more

Baptism meditation, Third Epiphany

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:47 pm By Peter Leithart

Ecclesiastes 4:8: There was a certain man without a second, having neither a son nor a brother, yet there was no end to all his labor. Indeed, his eyes were not satisfied with riches and he never asked, and for whom am I laboring and depriving myself of pleasure. This too is vapor and a grievous task. Children are a blessing from the Lord, the Psalmist tells us, and that blessing is multi-dimensional. There are many direct practical benefits to... Read more

Exhortation, Third Epiphany

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:41 pm By Peter Leithart

According to what has become the “traditional” interpretation of the Constitution, every American woman has the right to kill her unborn baby. Since the Roe v. Wade decision in January of 1973, over 45 million babies have been killed, and, though the abortion rate has slowed since 1990, more than a million babies are aborted each year. Nearly half the women in this country have an abortion before they are forty-five. (more…) Read more

Same and Other

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:02 am By Peter Leithart

Evaluating Levinas and his criticisms of Husserl, Derrida probes the coherence of Levinas’ notion of “infinitely other.” Contrary to Levinas, who argues that we are incorrectly seduced by everyday life to think of the other as an “alter ego,” Derrida says: “The other as alter ego signifies the other as other, irreducible to my ego, precisely becauase it is an ego, because it has the form of the ego, The egoity of the other permits him to say ‘ego’ as... Read more

Art for Art

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:46 pm By Peter Leithart

Adorno points out in an essay on television that “it would be romanticizing to assume that formlerly art was entirely pure, that the creative artist thought only in terms of the inner consistency of the artifact and not also of its effect upon the spectators. Theatrical art, in particular, cannot be separated from audience reaction. Conversely, vestiges of the aesthetic claim to be something autonomous, a world unto itself, remain even within the most trivial product of mass culture. In... Read more

Sermons and such

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:01 am By Peter Leithart

Auden said, “In my opinion sermons should be a) fewer b) longer c) more theologically instructive and less exhortatory. I must confess that in my life I have very seldom heard a sermon from which I derived any real spiritual benefit. Most of them told me that I should love God and my neighbour more than I do, but that I knew already.” His first experience of worship was of “exciting magical rituals” rather than sermons, and this “implanted in... Read more

Totality and Dialogue

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:51 pm By Peter Leithart

In “Violence and Metaphysics,” Derrida says that no “logos as absolute knowledge can comprehend the dialogue and the trajectory toward the other” because “the other is the other” and “all speech is for the other.” For Derrida, “A total logos still, in order to be logos, would have to let itself be proffered toward the other beyond its own totality. If, for example, there is an ontology or a logos of the comprehension of the Being (of beings), it is... Read more

Eros and epistemology

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:36 pm By Peter Leithart

For Aquinas, knowledge begins with knowledge of the effects of a thing. When faced with those effects, we naturally have a “desire to know about the cause what it is. This desire is one of wonder and causes inquiry.” The inquiry ceases when we arrive at knowledge of the essence of a cause, when that desire to answer quid est is satisfied (this from ST I-II, 3, 8). Hence, knowledge arouses puzzlement and desire, a kind of dissatisfaction, that provokes... Read more