Blinding Wealth

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

In his Anchor Bible commentary on Revelation (102-3), Craig Koester summarizes the book’s warnings about wealth. On the one hand, “wealth makes people ‘blind’”(Rev 3:17). The charge can be correlated with Babylon’s arrogant inability to see the destructive consequences of its actions (18:7–8). Public rhetoric lauded the prosperity that Rome provided, but critics added that Rome exerted greater control over its subjects by supplying them with goods than it ever could by force of arms, since commerce lulled people into... Read more

Consider the Fig

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

Ben Crair wants us to appreciate the fig as more than “a geriatric delicacy or the sticky stuff inside bad cookies.” Figs are “awesome: enclosed flowers that bloom modestly inward, unlike the flamboyant showoffs on other plants. Bite a fig in half and you’ll discover a core of tiny blossoms.” Flowers, and wasp carcasses: “Because a fig is actually a ball of flowers, it requires pollination, but because the flowers are sealed, not just any bug can crawl inside. That... Read more

Felix Culpa

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

Ingrid D. Rowland reviews several shows and books focusing on the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch (born Jheronimus van Aken), celebrating this the 500th anniversary of his birth. Rowland notes that “Bosch’s grandfather and grandmother enrolled as members of the Brotherhood of Our Lady, the local religious confraternity. Ever afterward, the brotherhood would provide their large extended family with spiritual solace, social contact, and artistic commissions.” Bosch’s religious views are captured in his Wayfarer: “Most scholars interpret the wayfarer as an... Read more

Felix Culpa

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

Mary Douglas and Taboo

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

In a review of Jacob Milgrom’s Anchor Bible Leviticus commentary, Jonathan Klawans provides a helpful summary of the achievement of Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger: Against especially Robertson Smith and Frazer, Douglas argued that avoidance behaviors could no longer be dismissed as something inherently or distinctly primitive. Douglas showed that our own notions of hygiene, for instance, are not necessarily any more rational or objective than the religious conceptions frequently dismissed as irrational. . . . Also against Frazer and... Read more

Mary Douglas and Taboo

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

Nature’s Nation

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

Americans have often justified American order and American exceptionalism by invoking “the myth of nature,” write Robert Hughes and C. Leonard Allen in Illusions of Innocence (205). They “first employed this myth to justify freedom from tyranny. But they soon began equating nature with particular dimensions of national life that seemed right or normal from their limited perspective. In this way they naturalized their particular culture and then heralded that culture as both universal and absolute (205). The ironies were... Read more

Nature’s Nation

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

Purity System

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

In her contribution to The Peace of God, Amy Remensnyder examines the eleventh-century crackdown on simony, clerical marriage and unchastity, and the clergy’s involvement in war. These were characterized as pollutions of the clergy and the church, and the rules were framed as purity prohibitions. Gregory VII denounced one simonist as a sexual pervert: “He dared to buy, as if she were a vile servant woman, the bride of Christ and to prostitute her to the devil. Trying to separate... Read more

America At War

Last updated on: August 18, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

“Chicken Fried” by the Zac Brown Band is a paean to everything a Southern man loves—cold beer on a Friday night, jeans that fit just right, the radio turned up, sunrise, the “touch of a precious child,” Moma’s love, and, of course, chicken. Near the end, the song turns patriotic: I thank god for my lifeAnd for the stars and stripesMay freedom forever fly, let it ring.Salute the ones who diedThe ones that give their livesSo we don’t have to... Read more

What happened to Jezebel as prophesied by Elijah?