The Triumph of One-Armed Bandits

Last updated on: April 8, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

“Until the mid-1980s, green-felt table games such as blackjack and craps dominated casino floors while slot machines huddled on the sidelines, serving to occupy the female companions of ‘real’ gamblers,” writes Natasha Dow Schull in her 2014 Addiction By Design. Slot machines were “often placed along hallways or near elevators and reservation desks, rarely with stools or chairs in front of them and thus “occupied transitional spaces rather than gambling destinations.” Since the late 1990s, that has changed: Slot machines... Read more

Breaking With the Imperium

Last updated on: April 8, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Listening to Rod Dreher read the final paragraph of After Virtue, I was struck by MacIntyre’s description of the political prerequisite for forming communities of virtue in the new dark ages that are upon us. Here’s the famous passage: “It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch... Read more

Breaking With the Imperium

Last updated on: April 8, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Areopagus in Acts

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

Paul’s speech on the Areopagus is the second of three programmatic speeches in Acts. Robert Tannehill notes (The Narrative Unity of Luke-Acts) that they trace the progression of Paul’s mission: “Careful planning is indicated by the fact that we have three different types of speeches addressed to three different audiences: a mission speech to Jews (13:16-41), a mission speech to Gentiles (17:22-31), and a farewell speech to the elders of the Ephesian church (20:18-35).” In this as in so much,... Read more

Areopagus in Acts

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

Romanticism and the Rhetoric of Music

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

Prior to the 18th century, writes Mark Evan Bonds, instrumental music was considered inferior to music that accompanied words (Wordless Rhetoric). According to the artistic theory developed by Johann Georg Sulzer, “instrumental music . . . can be pleasing and at times moving, but its ‘meaning’ is relatively obscure. Music without a text cannot specify the precise nature of the emotion it expresses or arouses within the listener. Vocal music, on the other hand, can make its emotional motivation explicit... Read more

Jigging and Expertise

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

In an essay on “The Intelligent Use of Space,” David Kirsh observed that since we have bodies, “we are spatially located creatures: we must always be facing some direction, have only certain objects in view, be within reach of certain others. How we manage the space around us, then, is not an afterthought; it is an integral part of the way we think, plan and behave, a central element in the way we shape the very world that constrains and... Read more

Pattern of Paul’s Mission

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

Robert Tannehill points out in the second volume of his Narrative Unity of Luke-Acts that Acts 16-19 depicts a recurring “public accusation type-scene.” Prior to chapter 16, the public accusations against Paul and his associates are not highlighted. After chapter 16, they are. “In 16:20-21 Romans accuse the mission of importing Jewish customs that undermine the customs that made Rome great. In 17: 5-7 Jews secure public support and accuse Christians before the magistrates of upsetting society and political subversion,... Read more

Pattern of Paul’s Mission

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

Pure Music

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

Mark Evan Bonds’s Absolute Music is a study of 19th-century debates concerning the purity or absoluteness of music, the question of the possibility and/or propriety of segregating music from the rest of the world, music as a sheer aesthetic experience, an experience of pure beauty or simple form. It’s a debate with a long afterlife in modernist music, not to mention the modernist movements in other arts. Advocates of absolute music claim that “music’s essence as autonomous, self-contained, and wholly... Read more

Which letter of Paul is addressed to a slave owner about a runaway slave?