Rites of the Stadium

Last updated on: November 19, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Modern sports are not simple competition between the two teams. If they were only about physical competition, games would be shorter, less glitzy, less energetic. Sports are ritualized events, liturgies. The crowd’s behavior is deliberately intensified with ritual elements – with mascots who emblem the team, with fight songs that energize and bind the fans into a single singing unit, with the moments of drama like the team’s bursting through the paper barrier as they come onto the field from the... Read more

Baptized Education

Last updated on: November 19, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

The Christian school has to function as a fruit of the Christian church. That does not mean it has to be administratively connected to a church. But to be Christian it has to take the church’s ministry as its given starting point. Specifically, I have in mind the sacrament, rite, or ordinance of baptism. What does baptism have to do with education? We might think very little. Kids from Christian schools are subjects of Christian nurture simply by virtue of... Read more

Incarnation in Exile

Last updated on: November 19, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Ezekiel’s initial vision is of the Lord’s chariot-throne, coming with whirling wheels and a sound like thunder, to visit him at the River Chebar. Though the prophet is in exile, the glory of the God of the temple is with him. Robert Jenson (Ezekiel) highlights the “incarnational” force of the overall vision. Not only does Yahweh come to be with His people, but He comes in a chariot that lumbers along the river, His heavenly throne entering earthly reality. Contrary... Read more

Crisis, Non-Sectarian Style?

Last updated on: November 18, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

To many Americans, Christians complaining about our culture sound whiny, self-interested, and sectarian. We yell, “Fire! Cultural conflagration!” Our unbelieving neighbors sniff and wonder why they can’t smell smoke. To their ears, our critiques of culture take this form: Christians used to be in charge; we aren’t anymore; we’d like to be again; if you don’t want us to be in charge, you don’t know what’s good for you, because it is good for everyone if we’re in charge. And... Read more

Wind of the Spirit

Last updated on: November 18, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

From the first moments of the creation, the Spirit of God has been working in the world to enliven and move it. As soon as there is a heaven and earth, the Spirit of God hovers over the formless emptiness of the waters, bringing light and order and moving the creation from glory to glory. The Spirit never leaves. Without the Spirit, there is no life, there is no movement, there is no order, there is no energy, there is no... Read more

Amnesiac Modernity

Last updated on: November 18, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

A wonderful quotation from Paul Connerton’s How Societies Remember, recently noted by Rod Dreher: “Under the conditions of modernity the celebration of recurrence can never be anything more than a compensatory strategy, because the principle of modernity itself denies the idea of life as a structure of celebrated recurrence. It denies credence to the thought that the life of the individual or a community either can or should derive its value from the acts of consciously performed recall, from the reliving... Read more

Being and Becoming

Last updated on: November 17, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Jesus is the “living one” (Revelation 1:18). He doesn’t mean that He has always been. He is the living one in the sense that He has been through the chiasm of death to life: A. and I became (egenomen) B. dead C. and behold B’. alive A’. I am (eimi) unto the ages of ages. If we can press the contrast of the verbs: Jesus became dead. We might take that as a gloss on incarnation. The Son entered into... Read more

Eros in Iberia

Last updated on: November 17, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Early twentieth-century Spain is often characterized as Catholic-conservative, repressive, backward. In Cultures of the Erotic in Spain, 1898-1939, UCLA’s Maite Zubiaurre introduces “the ‘other’ early twentieth-century Spain— sparkling, dynamic, uninhibited, freed from tradition, happily oblivious to sexual constraints and gender norms, so radically different from the somber, identity-searching country of which history seems so fond.” In place of the normal division between a liberal, modernizing Spain and a conservative and nationalist one, Zubiaurre offers a distinction between the “visible” and “ghostly,”... Read more

Ezekiel in John’s Gospel

Last updated on: November 17, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

John’s gospel differs in many ways from the three “synoptic” gospels. John begins with the majestic prologue that has no analogy in the other gospels. He never once hints that Jesus is an exorcist, he records Jesus’ many visits to Jerusalem, he places the cleansing of the temple early in the book, he records long discourses of Jesus and rarely anything that looks like a parable. Scholars have given many explanations for the divergences? Brian Peterson’s John’s Use of Ezekiel offers... Read more

Theater of Suicide

Last updated on: November 16, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Suicide has been the province of psychiatrists, sociologists, moralists, theologians, and the occasional anthropologist (Durkheim). It has not gotten much attention from students of theater and dramatic performance. The contributors to Suicide as a Dramatic Performance assume that such a perspective can be illuminating – for some, though not all suicides. The editors, David Lester and Steven Stack, offer some striking examples that establish the prima facie plausibility of their approach: “On November 25, 1970, in Tokyo, Japan, Yukio Mishima, aged... Read more

What does Proverbs say about hard work?