Flight

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

Monastic flight, Rowan Williams emphasizes (Silence and Honey Cakes), wasn’t “running away from responsibility or from relationships.” Rather, it is “about denying yourself the luxury of solving your problems by running away literally or physically from them . . . and about taking responsibility for your sins” (62–3). We might try to relieve the stress of our sins not by fleeing, but “restoring to ‘human company’”—but this can “blur the sharp edges of responsibility” and lead us to “imagine that... Read more

Ministering Sacraments by Faith

Last updated on: May 17, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

For many Christians, sacraments are locked in a winner-take-all battle with faith. Are we reconciled to God by faith or by baptism? Do we feed on Christ by believing or by eating bread and drinking wine? When we place too much emphasis on sacraments, many believe, we run the risk of wrecking faith on the shoals of superstition. That’s not the biblical outlook, nor a classic Protestant one. God imprints His name on us in baptism, and we trust that... Read more

Easy Sainthood

Last updated on: May 17, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Rowan Williams concludes a brief summary of the patristic debates about the double/single will of Jesus by saying “we are encouraged to see Jesus as fully aware of the general possibilities of human nature, including the possibilities of betrayal, cowardice, and self-gratification, aware of those as part of his composition as a person with a human nature, yet not actively welcoming, not saying yes to them, so that it still makes sense to describe him as without sin” (Silence and... Read more

A Community of the Fearless

Last updated on: May 16, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Monks fled. They did not flee from community or contact with others. They fled in order to become more deeply engaged with others in a more radical form of community. Rowan Williams writes (Silence and Honey Cakes), “What is learned in the desert is clearly not some individual technique for communing with the divine, but the business of becoming a means of reconciliation and healing for the neighbour. You ‘flee’ to the desert not to escape neighbours but to grasp... Read more

Sensitivity to Intrinsic Rightness

Last updated on: May 16, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Charles Taylor’s The Language Animal is a defense of HHH against HLC. That is, he thinks the linguistic perspective developed by Hamann, Herder, and Humboldt is superior to the rationalist and empiricist tradition of Hobbes, Locke, and Condillac. HLC “tried to understand language within the confines of the modern representational epistemology made dominant by Descartes.” We have ideas in the mind that represent reality, and knowledge is when the representation in ideas matches the reality. Beliefs “are constructed” and “the... Read more

Sensitivity to Intrinsic Rightness

Last updated on: May 16, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Why Do We Want Houses?

Last updated on: May 16, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Peter King begins his Private Dwelling by posing what he describes as simple, silly, obvious questions about housing: What is its use? Who needs it? What is housing for? Early on, he points to the “iconography” implied by our language about housing: “There is an iconography attached to housing that transcends the manner in which professionals and commentators conduct their discourses. This iconography is of that place which is mine or ours (where the ‘we’ in question is a family... Read more

Reformation Crucifixion

Last updated on: May 13, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In the second volume of his study of the cross in Western art (The Triumph of the Cross), Richard Viladesau notes that “the period immediately preceding the Reformation was one in which Christ’s passion was treated with graphic emphasis on the violence of the events and on the sufferings of Christ and of Mary. Their purpose was to evoke compassion and allow the viewer thereby to make the work of redemption his or her own. They used an increasing degree... Read more

Shakespeare on Sacraments

Last updated on: May 13, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In their essay on the Eucharist in Cultural Reformations, David Aers and Sarah Beckwith notes that “one of the central images in the exhortations to Holy Communion in the Book of Common Prayer and also in the ‘Homily of the Worthy Reception’ is the image of the heavenly banquet where all must be guests ‘and not gazers, eaters and not lookers.’” And they find a dramatization of this image in Shakespeare’s Tempest (163). “In Act 3, Scene 3 of The... Read more

Benjamin and Art’s Disenchantment

Last updated on: May 13, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Walter Benjamin had no totalizing philosophical system. He was an essayist, admits Ranier Rochlitz (The Disenchantment of Art). Rochlitz doesn’t use the term to demean, however. Benjamin “is not an essayist in the manner of Montaigne; the scientific imperative is not lacking in his essays. He conducts concrete research from a philosophical perspective.” In his essays, Benjamin “created or rethought numerous concepts that are part of philosophical debates today: notably, truth content and subject matter, symbol and allegory, aura and... Read more

What happened to the prophet Elijah at the end of his life?