Crowds

Last updated on: March 21, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd was first published in 1895. It reads like something taken from today’s headlines about the crowds generated by Donald Trump’s campaign. Le Bon argued that a crowd involved the “disappearance of conscious personality and the turning of feelings and thoughts in a definite direction, which are the primary characteristics of a crowd about to become organised, do not always involve the simultaneous presence of a number of individuals on one spot.” The most striking feature... Read more

Paul Provoked

Last updated on: March 21, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

As Paul strolls through Athens, what impresses him is not the architecture, culture, or art. He sees that the city is full of idols, and he is provoked in spirit (Acts 17:16). That provokes a few reflections. What did Paul see that others in Athens did not see? What would provoke Paul if he strolled through Times Square or Millennium Park of a Sunday afternoon? What kind of idols would he spot? Were the other Jews in Athens as provoked... Read more

The Music of Chemistry

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

Ben McFarland wants to convince his readers that the periodic table is a thing of beauty forever (A World From Dust). He admits that the table as normally presented is “not quite symmetric,” but points out that with a small adjustment “a mathematical pattern appears”: “By row, there are 2, 8, 8, 18, and 18 elements. The pattern continues below, but is obscured by the fact that on most tables 14 elements have been moved out of the 6th and... Read more

God Sending, God Sent

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

When Moses finds a bush burning on Mount Sinai, he turns aside to look. “Yahweh” sees him turn aside, so “God” (elohim) calls from the bush, Moses, Moses (Exodus 3:4). Earlier, we were told that the Angel of Yahweh “appearing in a blazing fire from the midst of the bush” (v. 2). So, who’s in the bush? Yahweh, His Angel, or “God”? We might say these are all names for the same being or person. Here “Yahweh” and “Angel of... Read more

Whom is Architecture For?

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

In his recent biography of Frank Gehry, Building Art, Paul Goldberger recounts this incident: “a jet-lagged Gehry, already in his eighties, must make his way to a Spanish press conference from an interrupted nap: The first reporter asked him what his response was to charges that his buildings were more in the line of dazzling spectacles than functional architecture. This time, he was too tired to be polite. He extended his middle finger. There was an awkward silence, and then... Read more

Islamic Syncretism

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

Andrew Walker’s “Eat the Heart Out of the Infidel” reaches deep into the history of African Islam to explain the rise of the murderous Boko Haram movement in Nigeria. The Islam of Western Africa was not a pure Islam, but a syncretic Islam that retained and adapted the preexisting animism. Drawing on the work of Arthur Treamearne, Walker writes, “What people believed in this part of the world before the coming of Islam would have been a cult-like belief, centred... Read more

Trinity in Theory and Practice

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

Making the Trinity practical seems like a very tall order. Few areas of Christian doctrine are more filled with technical mine fields, terms and concepts that must be used in very specific ways to avoid heresy. We have to talk about a God who is one God and yet somehow three. How He is three isn’t entirely clear, and the explanations don’t seem to clarify things very much. We have to talk about substance or essence. We have to make... Read more

Democracy and Class

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

In his forthcoming Democracy: A Life, Paul Cartledge summarizes Aristotle’s discussion of democracy in the Politics and the disputed Constitution of Athens. According to Cartledge, Aristotle “deconstructs or decomposes demokratia as such, that genus of ‘constitution’ as it were, into four sub-species, ranging along a spectrum from the most radical and ‘left-wing’ (what he calls the ‘last’ form of demokratia, a category applicable to Athens) to the most moderate, which most closely resembled and indeed overlapped with the most moderate... Read more

One Will

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

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It is sometimes argued that the Christological formula of essence and person determines the way to understand person and essence in Trinitarian theology. The incarnate Son is a single person, the Person of the divine Son. But this Person exists in two natures. The church rejected monophysite Christologies; Jesus has two natures. And, the church rejected monothelite Christologies; Jesus has two wills. On this paradigm, “will” must be an attribute of nature rather than Person. Otherwise, we’d be monothelites. Applied... Read more

Congregational Singing in Medieval Liturgy

Last updated on: March 15, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In his book on Worship Wars in Early Lutheranism, Joseph Herl argues that, though Luther advocated congregational singing, the Lutheran liturgy remained a largely choral liturgy for the first generations after the Reformation. Along the way to making his case, he dispels some myths about the medieval mass. Contrary to popular perceptions, Catholic worship was not monolithic: “The pre-Reformation church was marked by liturgical diversity. It was not until the Tridentine missal appeared in 1570 that uniformity in liturgy was... Read more

The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in ____.