Parochial Postmodernism

Last updated on: December 7, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

David Harvey (Ways of the World) describes our cultural moment in terms of “space-time compression,” and finds an analogy with the speed-up of life that was widely noted at the beginning of the twentieth century: “While historical analogies are always dangerous, I think it no accident that postmodern sensibility evidences strong sympathies for certain of the confused political, cultural and philosophical movements that occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century (in vienna, for example) when the sense of time–space... Read more

Shakespeare’s Songs

Last updated on: December 7, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Late at night in Lady Olivia’s great house in Illyrium, three friends – Sir Toby, the lady’s uncle, Feste her fool, and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, her hapless suitor – sing drunken songs that resound loudly through the empty halls. Malvolio, Lady Olivia’s stern steward and “something of a Puritan,” rises from bed to chide the drunkards, but they respond by mocking him with more songs: Sir Toby: Shall I bid him go? Feste: What an if you do? Sir Toby:... Read more

Cultural Geography

Last updated on: December 4, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In his forthcoming collection of essays, The Ways of the World, David Harvey observes that “it is impossible on the ground and in the streets to see where nature ends and culture begins. imposing a dichotomy where there is none is a fatal mistake.” Geography is his great illustration of this point: “the world’s geography has been and is being constantly made, re-made and sometimes even destroyed in order to absorb rapidly accumulating surpluses of capital. The simple answer to the... Read more

Losing the Body

Last updated on: December 4, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

The Economist’s review of Thomas Lacqueur’s The Work of the Dead highlights the shifts in our funeral customs over the past few centuries: “A large part of the book is devoted to the slow transition from churchyards to cemeteries, a story of changing sensibilities, epitomised by the gradual replacement of the epitaph Hic jacet (‘Here lies the body. . .’) by the less corporeal ‘In memory of. . .’ . It is about the rise of material refinement during the 18th century,... Read more

Hamlet in Society

Last updated on: December 4, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Despite the distracting use of the opposition of of “authenticity” and “responsibility,” Terry Eagleton has some thoughtful observations on the tragic dilemma in Hamlet (Shakespeare and Society, 1967). Hamlet’s is a society of “reciprocal human definitions,” that is to say, a man’s identity is mirrored to him by society, and this social reflection of identity may be quite different from his own self-conception. What to do? Eagleton suggests there are three options: 1) accept the social definition, but also find... Read more

In the Fullness of Time

Last updated on: December 4, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

As Robert Jenson has argued, the big question of religion is the question of eternity: How is God related to time? For Greco-Roman paganism and for the great religions of the far east, god or the gods are immune to time, alien to time. The whole point of Plato’s forms is to provide a stable fixity to changing sensible reality. Many Christians think of God’s eternity as timelessness. But Ecclesiastes 3 points to something else: Our lives are patterned by... Read more

Jerusalem, Sennacherib, and Us

Last updated on: December 3, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

The story of Jerusalem’s deliverance from Sennacherib’s Assyrian army, told in both 2 Kings and Isaiah, is an exciting account. It’s a story worthy of Byron’s galloping verse, his medieval ballad. But still: So what? What does all this ancient history have to do with me, with my problems, with my world? An exciting story, but let’s move on to something more relevant, something more useful. Why talk about the Rabshakeh and Sennacherib and Hezekiah and the ins and outs... Read more

Rhetoric: Ancient, Modern, Postmodern

Last updated on: December 3, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Rhetoric is an ancient art. It was one of the main courses of study in ancient schools, along with grammar and logic. During the days of the Roman Empire, learning rhetoric was a path to power and prestige. Augustine, the great church father of North Africa, was trained as a rhetorician, and was climbing the ladder of Roman society when God called him to a very different sort of speech-making in the pulpit at Hippo. According to Quintillian, rhetoric is... Read more

Hamlet Among Protestants and Catholics

Last updated on: December 3, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Most readers and viewers of Hamlet take Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy as a meditation on suicide. In Hamlet, Protestantism, and the Mourning of Contingency, John E. Curran, Associate Professor of English at Marquette University, argues there are bigger things at work. Hamlet is opposing two ontologies, religious universes, moralities. The first Curran labels “the Be.” The Be is the realm of predetermined fixity, without freedom, choice or contingency. It is an either/or, zero-sum world where every divine initiative must be at... Read more

Slaughterhouse of the World

Last updated on: December 2, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Yahweh brings a devastating judgment on His own people and on Edom, slaughtering and destroying them. He empties the land of Edom, and fills their cities with wild animals (Isaiah 34-35). What has this got to do with us? Everything. What Isaiah depicts is a figure of the gospel story. Jesus is the true Israelite, the genuine Heavenly Man, the Bright Morning Star, who comes to offer Himself as a living sacrifice, to place Himself under the sword and to throw... Read more

True or False: In Revelation, the number of the beast is 777.