Girls Will Be Boys

Last updated on: August 26, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Laura Horak’s Girls Will Be Boys examines cross-dressing women and lesbians in early 20th-century American film. According to the TLS review, “The sheer number of cross-dressed girls/women and the instances of same-sex female desire that featured in the films of 1908-34 is staggering. (Horak unearthed 476 relevant titles, traveling to archives across North America and Europe to view around 200 of them.) This phenomenon extended, as Horak explains, beyond the predictable tropes of murderous mannish lesbians, oddball female inverts and... Read more

Girls Will Be Boys

Last updated on: August 26, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

The Private Public

Last updated on: August 25, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In a 2008 essay in The Princeton Seminary Bulletin (since reprinted elsewhere), Oliver O’Donovan observes that understanding “difference as plurality” reflects an anxiety about difference. Not all difference creates anxiety, but only those differences of “practical principle” that form subcultures that “act on contrary assumptions and pursue divergent courses in their relations with each other.” From this angle, O’Donovan ponders why we add an “ism” to the word “pluralism.” Pluralism treats these differences of practical principle as “a foundational problem,... Read more

Ark Among Gentiles

Last updated on: August 24, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

David’s first effort to bring the ark of the covenant into Jerusalem was a failure. The set-up was wrong from the beginning; instead of appointing Levites to transport the ark on their shoulders, David placed the ark on a cart pulled by oxen. When the ark became unsteady, Uzza reached out his hand to catch it and was killed (1 Chronicles 13). It was a repeat of the establishment of the Mosaic tabernacle: As soon as it was erected, Aaron’s... Read more

It Takes A City

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

In a 1977 Daedalus article on “The Family and the City,” French historian Philippe Aries argued that “the real roots of the present domestic crisis lie not in our families, but in our cities.” As cities “deterioriated” and urban culture weakened, “the omnipotent, omnipresent family took upon itself the task of trying to satisfy all the emotional and social needs of its members.” The stress on modern families, Aries says, is a result of overextension, an effort to compensate for... Read more

The Beast

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

In an 1881 article, F.W. Farrar examined the case for Nero as the sea beast of Revelation 13. Many contemporary scholars dismiss this because they believe that Revelation was written decades after Nero. Farrar makes a circumstantial and exegetical case for the identification, and in the process provides a vivid portrait of the turmoil of Rome, circa 64 AD. Nero’s reign as emperor took place in the middle of a period of political chaos: “one after another [emperor] perished by... Read more

Born in Zion

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

Psalm 87 is a hymn to Zion. The name “Zion” occurs four times, and the Psalm declares Yahweh’s love for Zion (v. 1), the glory of Zion as city of God (v. 2), the joy that fills Zion (v. 6). It could be a “nationalistic” hymn to Israel’s ancient capital, but it isn’t. While celebrating Zion as the holy mountain and dwelling of God, the Psalm also lists the nations other than Israel that know God: Egypt, Babylon, Philistia, Tyre,... Read more

Binge Drinking

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

Caitlin Flanagan offers a characteristically searching analysis of the roots of our binge drinking academic, tracing it to a new mode of parenting that she describes as “Get-Real Parenting.” But she recognizes that it has a deeper source than parenting style: The hollowness at the center of their lives—the increasing abandonment of religion, the untethering of sexuality not just from relationships but even from kindness, the race to jump aboard the STEM express because that’s where the money is, the... Read more

Making Nature More Natural

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

Nathaniel Rich reviews the Library of America edition of the works of Frederick Law Olmsted, designer of Central Park, inventor of landscape gardening, inspirer of the national park system. Rich discerns an “unmistakable irony” in Olmsted’s theory of landscape: “It takes a lot of artifice to create convincing ‘natural’ scenery. Everything in Central Park is man-made; the same is true of most of Olmsted’s designs. They are not imitations of nature so much as idealizations, like the landscape paintings of... Read more

Iran’s Nukes

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

In one of man jaw-dropping reminders in America’s War for the Greater Middle East, Andrew Bacevich notes the origin of Iran’s nuclear programs, so much and so controversially in the news of late: During Nixon’s Presidency, while the Shah ruled Iran, “U.S. arms exports to Iran sky-rocketed. Between 1950 and 1972 the United States had provided Iran with approximately $1.5 billion of weapons, the costs largely covered by grant aid. By 1973 Tehran had become a paying customer. That year... Read more

Who was lowered through a roof to be healed by Jesus?