Economy of Force

Last updated on: February 24, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Patricia Owens summarizes her recent Economy of Force in a symposium at The Disorder of Things. Her book is a history of modern counterinsurgency, but that history has much broader implications for the history of political thought and scholarship on international relations. As Owens puts it, “The book is a study of oikonomia in the use of force, from oikos, ancient Greek for household. But it also makes a larger claim, that household governance underlies the relatively recent rise of... Read more

Translating Dostoevsky

Last updated on: February 23, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In a 2005 New Yorker piece, David Remnick surveyed the efforts to bring Dostoevsky and Tolstoy into English. For decades, the field was dominated by the translations of Constance Garnett. They were far from universally liked. Nabokov “ranks Tolstoy at the top of all Russian prose writers and Anna as his masterpiece—and pronounces Garnett’s translation ‘a complete disaster.’ Brodsky agreed; he once said, ‘The reason English-speaking readers can barely tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is that they aren’t... Read more

Scripture in Early Christianity

Last updated on: February 23, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

James Kugel lays out four assumptions about Scripture shared by Bible readers in the early centuries of the church (Traditions of the Bible, 15-19): First, “the Bible is a fundamentally cryptic document. That is, all interpreters are fond of maintaining that although Scripture may appear to be saying X, what it really means is Y, or that while Y is not openly said by Scripture, it is somehow implied or hinted at in X.” Second, “Scripture constitutes one great Book... Read more

Debtor Nation

Last updated on: February 23, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

“In 2010, Americans had total debt outstanding of $52.4 trillion, more than three-and-a-half times the country’s gross domestic product,” writes Rowena Olegario in The Engine of Enterprise (1). Over $13 trillion is household debt, $24.5 is business debt, and 24% or $12.4 trillion is government debt, mostly federal debt. Each American is “responsible for nearly $170,000.” The levels are unprecedented, but not the use of credit: “Americans now borrowed more to consume more. But from the beginning, they had used... Read more

The Young and the Restless

Last updated on: February 22, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

I admit a bias at the outset: In 20008, the US elected a President younger than I, and I now find myself older than many leaders in DC, older than many of the writers, columnists and scholars that I learn from. It’s hard to adjust to the fact that “old” Tim Duncan is only a few years older than my oldest son. I don’t think this is the only reason I perked up when I saw Noemie Emery’s Weekly Standard... Read more

Criticism v. Correction

Last updated on: February 22, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In the March 2016 print edition of First Things, RR Reno explains the limits of “critical thinking,” often offered as “an intellectual cure-all for what limits our desire to know.” Reno acknowledges that “The critical strategy for renewing the intellectual life can seem exactly the right way to tear away the falsifying veil we fabricate to protect ourselves from reality. The disenchanting work of critical analysis drives a wedge between our minds and convenient falsehoods.” That disenchantment, that shattering of... Read more

You Are A Temple

Last updated on: February 22, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Yahweh descended from Sinai to take up residence in the tabernacle, to make His home in the midst of His people. Though access to His house was limited, He intended the tabernacle to be a house of hospitality. In the house were a table of showbread for food, a lampstand to shed light, an altar of incense that represented prayer. Bread, light, and incense are God’s gifts to Israel. Priests entered to minister in the Holy Place, to eat the... Read more

Law of Sanctuary, Law of Society

Last updated on: February 19, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

The Ten Words (Exodus 20) are organized in two sets of five commandments, one pertaining to our relationship to God and the other our relationships with one another. James Jordan has argued that the two sets of five run in parallel. The five words about worship match the five words about social relations. The first commandment forbids idolatry: “You shall have no other gods before Me,” Yahweh says. Israel is to give honor and glory only to Him. Corresponding to... Read more

Invisible Hands

Last updated on: February 19, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Once upon a time, Europeans believed that the order of the world was the result of God’s providential guidance of all things. Along came Newton, who demonstrates that the world was a machine that operated by laws that could be described in mathematical terms. As Jonathan Sheehan and Dror Warhman put it (Invisible Hands, x), according to this story “Thereafter, God receded from mundane things, perhaps setting the gears of the world in motion, but above all content to let... Read more

Eucharist and Atonement

Last updated on: February 19, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Early Christians expended huge amounts of energy and intellectual subtlety in working out the implications of the gospel for their understanding of God and of Jesus. “Trinity” and “Christology” were the theological monuments of the patristic era. John MacIntyre (Shape of Soteriology) points out that we find nothing comparable on the question of the “relation of Christ’s death to our redemption.” Neither creeds nor theologians produced “a full theory of atonement” but were content to “employ a selection of the... Read more

Who said, "For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain"?