Who Owns Antiquities?

Last updated on: September 23, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Maxwell Anderson’s forthcoming Antiquities surveys the world of antiquities, summarizing law, history of collection, the difference between the interests of archeologists and antiquities dealers, forgeries and their detection, the market in antiquities. Everything you’d want to know. Anderson places the rise of interest in antiquities in the context of the emergence of national identity: “With the emergence of statehood came pride in ancestral origins, even if embroidered to the point of invented memories. Pride in the cultural heritage of a... Read more

Sacred Distraction

Last updated on: September 23, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In his poignant, deeply personal New York essay on his distraction addiction, Andrew Sullivan reflects on the silence of sacred places: “From the moment I entered a church in my childhood, I understood that this place was different because it was so quiet. The Mass itself was full of silences—those liturgical pauses that would never do in a theater, those minutes of quiet after communion when we were encouraged to get lost in prayer, those liturgical spaces that seemed to... Read more

Why We Need Leviathan

Last updated on: September 23, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In a NYRB review of Anthony Gottlieb’s Dream of Enlightenment, Thomas Nagel corrects Gottlieb’s account of Hobbes’s moral philosophy. He lucidly summarizes Hobbes’s moral argument for absolutism: Hobbes’s theory, and what led to his being attacked as a moral nihilist, was his refusal to appeal to any concern for the good of others or the collective good as a basis for moral motivation. He demonstrated that the familiar rules of morality, which he called the laws of nature, are principles... Read more

Creativity in a Secular Age

Last updated on: September 23, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Toward the end of the rambunctious Paris Review interview, sometimes a meta-interview about the process of interviewing, Mark Helprin answers the question, Why do you write? As always, he answers circuitously, by contrasting creativity in pre- and modern art: . . . in a secular world, each artist is a mini-god, tasked with creating new universes between breakfast and dinner. It used to be that if one believed, like Dante or Shakespeare, one was content to imitate the beauties of... Read more

Confusion of Humanity, Reign of God

Last updated on: September 22, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

As everyone now knows, 2016 has been dubbed the year of the “Flight 93 Election” by an anonymous writer with a Latin pseudonym. The piece in the Claremont Review of Books is a frontal assault on conservative intellectuals and an “it’s worth a try” defense of Trumpism. As he writes, “conservatives routinely present a litany of ills plaguing the body politic. Illegitimacy. Crime. Massive, expensive, intrusive, out-of-control government. Politically correct McCarthyism. Ever-higher taxes and ever-deteriorating services and infrastructure. Inability to... Read more

Abraham’s Fourfold Genealogy

Last updated on: September 22, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Abraham’s genealogy in 1 Chronicles 1 can’t seem to get off the ground. He’s identified as father of “Isaac and Ishmael” (v. 28), but the genealogy that follows goes off with 12 sons of Ishmael (the genealogy is enclosed with Ishmael’s name, vv. 29–31) and leave Isaac behind. Finally, we hope, we get to Isaac, but verse 32 lists the 6 sons of Keturah, and adds further generations of Jokshan and Midian. Again, the whole is enclosed by references to... Read more

Communio Beyond Ecclesiology

Last updated on: September 21, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Communio has been a key concept in Roman Catholicism over the past century, but David L. Schindler (Heart of the World, Center of the Church) observes that it has a more-than-ecclesial scope. It implies a certain relation between the church and the world, and a vision of the future of the world: the whole world, in and through the Church, is destined for a transfiguring espousal with Jesus Christ. The espousal is meant to include human beings, not only in... Read more

Atomizing and Abstraction

Last updated on: September 20, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

I’ve been reading commentaries on Revelation 1:12–20, learning a great deal, but getting increasingly frustrated. Even the best commentators sometimes fall into the twin faults of contemporary interpretation—atomization and abstraction. Let’s take the “robe” that Jesus wears. Many have suggested that the robe designates Jesus as a priest, but other commentators doubt it. The reasons for doubt are several: Jesus is never called priest, other officials wear robes, the robe he wears doesn’t exactly match, in appearance or in terminology,... Read more

Guilt and Guilt-Bearing

Last updated on: September 20, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Brad Littlejohn presents a number of criticisms of my account of penal substitution in Delivered from the Elements of the World. I won’t attempt to address all of them, but focus—at once too briefly and at tedious length—on Brad’s central substantive question, which concerns guilt and Jesus’ guilt-bearing. First, a point about the motivations behind my treatment of the topic. My main aim was to present an account of penal substitution that could withstand recent and long-standing criticisms, among which... Read more

Beyond Language?

Last updated on: September 19, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In his Anchor Bible commentary on Revelation, Craig Koester says this about John’s initial vision of Jesus: “The figure’s appearance defies easy description: hair that is white like wool or snow, eyes like a flame of fire, a voice like rushing water, a face like the sun. The comparisons show that what John describes does not fit within the confines of ordinary speech. He uses analogies from human experience to depict something from a different realm” (249). I confess I... Read more

Which book directly follows Joshua?