Who Will Leave Us Alone?

Last updated on: June 7, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Susan Hanssen describes Trump as an old-fashioned Whig. It’s an intriguing history lesson, but I was especially taken by her conclusion. “If America is going to be rebuilt it will be rebuilt at the grassroots level, and that grassroots effort is actually going remarkably well,” Hanssen writes. What the grassroots need from a President is not salvation or leadership, but a cover: “The grassroots simply need an umbrella to ward off the federal government’s ubiquitous efforts to shut them down.... Read more

Critic at the Agon

Last updated on: June 7, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

At the beginning of his account of The Origins of Criticism, Andrew Ford offers an initial definition of criticism: “To begin this study, criticism will be any public act of praise or blame upon a performance of song.” That definition brings out several features of early criticism. First, like the performance of song or poetry itself, criticism is a public performance: “we should consider the critic, no less than the poet, a performer before a social group.” Further, the terms... Read more

Paul’s Athenian Theology

Last updated on: June 7, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Paul delivered a sermon in Athens (Acts 17). It’s addressed to philosophers and pagan priests. It also expresses a theological vision. What is the theology of the Mars Hill sermon? God. Christianity is a message about God. He is the maker of the world, not merely the world system but of every particular thing (v. 24; panta ta en auto). He has not delegated the dirty work of world-formation to a demiurgic subordinate, but made the world Himself. Specifically, He... Read more

Music and Risk

Last updated on: June 6, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Culture, writes David Goldman, is “inherently hostile to innovation. T.S. Eliot famously defined English culture as the regatta, the Glorious Twelfth, Wensleydale cheese, beetroot in vinegar, vestments, bishops, the music of Elgar — the minutiae of daily life accreted over generations. Culture is what does not change.” Yet there have been eras driven by what Oswald Spengler called “Faustian” restlessness. The 19th century was one of them. As Goldman says, “the Faustian spirit of the 19th century gave us all... Read more

On Classical Metaphor

Last updated on: June 6, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Metaphor has had a good run for the past several decades. Philosophers, linguists, and literary theorists have renounced the reductive “classical” understanding of metaphor that treated it as an expendable adornment of the literal. Instead, we have discovered that metaphor is inherent in language itself, and even sets the pathways of thought. G. R. Boys-Stones wonders: “What is this classical understanding that is being rejected? Did ancient writers actually believe that metaphor was as secondary as we believe they did?”... Read more

Bavinck on Catholicity

Last updated on: June 6, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

It depends on our concept of this universalism of the Christian religion whether we become narrow or broad in our ecclesiology,” wrote the Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck in an essay translated by John Bolt in the Calvin Theological Journal. How we relate grace to nature, re-creation (herschepping) to creation (schepping), determines whether our ecclesiastical vision will be broad or narrow.” The question of catholicity was “of the greatest significance in our time,” a time “rife with errors and schisms.” After... Read more

Is Architecture about Space?

Last updated on: June 3, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

It seems a given, a truism, that architecture is about space. Ali Madanipour indicates otherwise. In his Design of Urban Space, he notes that the word rarely appears in architecture texts books, and observes that “the term is relatively new, in the context of the long history of architecture, and that it has become a controversial concept in recent decades” (7). Some theorists, to be sure, see space as the essence of architecture. According to Bruno Zevi, “The facades and... Read more

Magical Realism, Russian Style

Last updated on: June 3, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Boris Fishman celebrates the 50th anniversary of Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita at the NYTBR, a 50th anniversary that should be a 75th: “the author completed it in 1940, just as his own brief life was ending. But in the Soviet Union of the time—then concluding one of the most grotesquely violent decades in history—the fate of authors like Bulgakov was so precarious that he was fortunate to die of natural causes. Having finished the book, he reportedly... Read more

Prophets and Ritual

Last updated on: June 3, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Israel’s prophets excoriate the worship of Israel, in such terms that some commentators have concluded that they are attacking ritual as such. That cannot be, argues Dru Johnson (Knowledge by Ritual). Micah’s answer to the question, “How shall I approach YHWH?” is not to counsel his hearers to ignore Torah: “Micah does not answer the question . . . by suggesting that sacrifice is not needed to approach YHWH. It is a radical claim to say that Micah believes Israel... Read more

Avant Garde and the Profit Motive

Last updated on: June 2, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Nicholas Vazsonyi’s Richard Wagner is subtitled “Self-Promotion and the Making of a Brand.” It’s a study of the methods Wagner used to establish himself and his music as a brand: “creation of a persona, public relations, development of a niche and brand, marketing embedded in the theatrical works themselves, and establishment of a hub and global network” (7). Nietzsche already had pegged him: “Describing the theatricality which infused both his art and life, [Nietzsche] epigrammatically called Wagner an incomparable ‘histrio,’... Read more

How many New Testament books were written by John?