The Politics of Lear

Last updated on: November 5, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

According to Fintan O’Toole’s NYRB review, James Shapiro’s The Year of Lear helps to unravel some of the mysteries of that most haunting of Shakespeare’s tragedies. O’Toole nicely captures why the play is so haunting: “King Lear is not apocalyptic, it is far worse. Instead of deserved damnation and merited salvation, there is merely the big fat O, the nothing that haunts the play, the ‘O, O, O, O!’ with which Lear expires. Even Shakespeare seems to have thought twice about this utter... Read more

Whose Body Is It?

Last updated on: November 5, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

A year ago, Sarah Ditum wrote a piece for The New Statesman that compared abortion with organ donation, pointing out that the demands on a pregnant woman’s body are far greater than the demands laid on organ donors: “giving away a bagful of gore or a chunk of liver that you’re not using because you’re dead is trivial compared to what is asked of the pregnant woman. For at least nine months, she must dedicate her body to the sustenance of another.... Read more

The Altar Call

Last updated on: November 5, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Detached from the Eucharistic liturgy, preaching is at sea. Preachers announce the gospel and call our people to faith. We also want to give them something to do. There are dangers on both sides: We may so much emphasize the grace of God that we provide sophisticated excuses for passivity and inaction, if not sin; we may so emphasize the duties of the Christian life that our preaching becomes little more than moralizing. We want to tell our people to... Read more

Double Double Retribution

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

Revelation 18:6 is made of two chiastic sentences that double back on each other. A. Pay B. her B’. as also she A’. paid. And: A. Double double according to her works B. in the cup C. she mixed C’. mix B’. her A’. double. Verse 7 says that she is going to receive the opposite of what she took. She glorified herself and lived complacency, and the payback will be that she will be receive torment and mourning in... Read more

Sins Stuck to Heaven

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

A heavenly voice (Revelation 18:4) tells the saints to flee Babylon because her sins have “piled” to heaven (v. 5). That translation is questionable. The verb kollao means to “cling,” as a marriage man clings to his wife (Matthew 19:5; cf. 1 Corinthians 6:16-17; Genesis 2:24, LXX) or as dust clings to the feet (Luke 10:11), or as Jews and Gentiles cling to one another (Acts 5:13; 9:26; 10:28). Babylon’s sins cling to heaven, as pestilence clings to Israel when they break covenant... Read more

The Poets of War

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

Geert Buelens’s Everything To Nothing offers a European-wide review of the poets writing before and during World War I. It is a tour de force, recalling forgotten poets to vivid life and setting better-known poets in a new European context. The poets, he argues, were not only observers but participants, major participants in the development of the “war culture” of the Great war: “Their work accuses, analyzes and describes, although sometimes it also goads or whitewashes. Above all, it is the... Read more

Memory, Meaning, Metaphor

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

“Memory is the sine qua non of the creation of meaning,” writes Nicholae Babuts in his Literature and the Metaphoric Universe in the Mind. “Human beings are capable of interpreting the world because they remember not only the moments that have just elapsed, but also events that have taken place a long time ago. And that includes their readings. Without the mnemonic function, the world would appear in a blurring indexical assembly of objects that would have no meaning beyond an... Read more

A Brief for Sabellius

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

Christian Faith, Brian Gerrish’s new dogmatics, is well named, echoing as it does Schleiermacher’s classic text. Gerrish is Schleiermachian in many ways, not least in his repetition of what has become, after Barth, one of Schleiermacher’s most notorious gestures: His placement of the doctrine of the Trinity at the end of his dogmatics. Gerrish defends Schleiermacher’s decision: “It is a mistake, frequently made, to dismiss Schleiermacher’s conclusion on the Trinity as a feeble afterthought that only proves he attached no... Read more

City Depopulated and Repopulated

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

The opening description of Babylon in Revelation 18 suggests a city depopulated and repopulated. The people have been moved out, and in their place it has been infested with impurity. There are four categories of new inhabitants: demons and unclean spirits, unclean and abominable birds, and they are divided into three groups by three terms for their location: Demons are in the “habitation,” there is a “prison” for unclean spirits, and another “prison” for unclean and detestable birds. The Greek... Read more

Slavery and the Monroe Doctrine

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

By the Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves, the US Congress decided that no more slaves were to be imported to the United States. The law passed in 1807 and went into effect in 1808. The slave trade to the Americas did not end. As Stephen Chambers notes in his No God But Gain, “Fully 25 percent (3.2 million) of all the enslaved Africans to arrive in the Americas were brought after the U.S. ban. Just as significantly, more than 85... Read more