What Is A Family?

Last updated on: May 5, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In her Sexual Authenticity, Melinda Selmys says that the distinction between “traditional” and “alternative” families is often misunderstood: “At the heart of it is distinction between family as something we choose to meet our own needs and desires (for comfort, security, affection, etc.), and family as something that we are thrust into and that makes claims on our moral and integral humanity” (113). The difference is that traditional families have a quality of givenness, thrownness, that alternative families cannot replicate.... Read more

Scotus’s Sacramental Occasionalism

Last updated on: May 4, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Richard Cross’s 1999 Duns Scotus in the Great Medieval Thinkers series is an excellent, concise introduction to this most controverted of medieval theologians. It’s dense, so is its subject. Cross spends a late chapter dealing with some central themes in Scotus’s sacramental theology – his theory of sacramental causality, his view of sacramental grace and sacramental character, and his views on the Eucharist and transubstantiation. Scotus operates with the general prmise that “humanity has always needed signs of God’s activity.”... Read more

Beyond Monogamy

Last updated on: May 4, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

First gays were oppressed by being excluded from marriage. Now they are oppressed for being confined to it. In her forthcoming Beyond Monogamy, Tulane’s Mimi Schippers argues that we won’t reach real sexual freedom until monogamy is cast into the dustbin. Gays and bisexuals and polysexuals of various sorts are still too confined by the givens of heterosexual society: “One of the objects given to us by heterosexual culture is the monogamous couple. In order to live a ‘good life’... Read more

Theories of Modernity

Last updated on: May 4, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In an essay on “Two Theories of Modernity,” Charles Taylor distinguishes between cultural and a-cultural theories of modernization. The former type of theory is “one that characterizes the transformations that have issued in the modern West mainly in terms of the rise of a new culture. The contemporary Atlantic world is seen as one culture (or group of closely related cultures) among others, with its own specific understandings, for example, of person, nature, the good, to be contrasted to all... Read more

Multiple Modernities

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

“Classic theories of modernization, from the 1950s,” write the editors of Reflections on Multiple Modernities, “identified the core of modernity, of modern social structure, as the decomposition of older ‘closed’ formations and . . . of the growing potential for social mobilization, and the concomitant development of new structural, institutional, and cultural features. The most important structural dimension of modernity attesting to the decomposition of relatively narrow formations was the growing tendency to structural differentiation, most apparent in the growth... Read more

Rhetorical Timing

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

In the introduction to Rhetoric and Kairos, editor Phillip Sipiora notes that “kairos first appeared in the Iliad, where it denotes a vital or lethal place in the body, one that is particularly susceptible to injury and therefore necessitates special protection; kairos thus, initially, carries a spatial meaning. In Hesiod’s Works and Days, kairos takes on the sense of ‘due measure’ or ‘proper proportion’; for example, Hesiod cites the overloading of a wagon, which can cause the axle to break.”... Read more

Light to the Nations

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

The city that descends from heaven in Revelation 21:9-22:5 shines with the glory of God. She is a light to the nations: “nations shall walk by its light, and the kings of the earth shall bring their glory into it” (v. 24). That image provides a neat model of mission. The city is the church, a city among the nations. It is the light source. The nations are not a light source, and without the light from the city the... Read more

Shakespeare and Chivalry

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

In the Weekly Standard, Paul Cantor explains that both Shakespeare and Cervantes aimed their writing at a common target: Chivalry. He describes chivalry as “a noble ideal and at its best it did much to refine an otherwise coarse and brutal world, but it rested on shaky foundations and had many unintended and disastrous consequences. Chivalry was a way of life, a distinctive mode of conducting both war and love. In its purest form, it tried to reconceive war as... Read more

Jerusalem’s Jasper Walls

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

Jerusalem descends from heaven a jeweled bride, with the luminosity of a precious stone, a “crystal-clear jasper” (v. 11; hos litho iaspidi krustallizonti). She is also surrounded by a jasper wall (v. 18). How might the city be related to the wall? The structure of 21:18-22 gives us a clue. Verses 18 and 21 both include the phrase “pure gold” (chrusion katharon), and both make reference to glass. These similar lines frame a chiastic section of the passage: A. City... Read more

Signs of the Times

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

In a 2009 University of Michigan dissertation, Richard Persky explores the cultural meaning of time in ancient Greece, focusing on the concept of kairos. According to Persky, “a kairos is a moment of opportunity, the right time to do some particular thing. The allegorical sculpture made by Lysippos and described in an ecphrastic epigram of Posidippos had attributes suggesting speed, sharpness, and elusiveness; its hair was long in front but shaved in back, because the kairos can be seized as... Read more

According to Hebrews, who serves as a copy and shadow of what is in heaven?