The Un-Ideal Community

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

In Life Together, Bonhoeffer explains that “Christian community is not an ideal, but a divine reality” (quoted in Paul House, Bonhoeffer’s Seminary Vision, 109). That is not merely a theoretical distinction. In Bonhoeffer’s opinion, “On innumerable occasions a whole Christian community has been shattered because it has lived on the basis of a wishful image” (quoted in House, 109). Christians join a Christian community with a distinct idea of what they should find, but, in House’s words, they “can quickly become very... Read more

Jesus, Paul, and Baptism

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

In his recent book on Bonhoeffer’s Seminary Vision, Paul House notes that Bonhoeffer insists (in Cost of Discipleship) that we cannot pit Jesus against Paul. One of the key continuities between the two is baptism. Bonhoeffer writes, “Where the Synoptic Gospels speak of Christ calling men and their following him, St. Paul speaks of Baptism” (quoted by House, 80-81). House elaborates: “Baptism is god’s gift to believers. They receive baptism in an essentially passive manner; they surrender to Jesus and are baptized... Read more

Musicophilia

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

The NYT‘s obituary for Oliver Sacks mentions that his 2007 Musicophilia was written partly in response to Steven Pinker’s claim that music is “auditory cheesecake, an evolutionary accident piggybacking on language.” Sacks “pointed to [music’s] ability to reach dementia patients as evidence that music appreciation is hard-wired into the brain.” He said in a lecture at Columbia in 2006 that “I haven’t heard of a human being who isn’t musical, or who doesn’t respond to music one way or another . .... Read more

Why We Can’t Face Evil

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

According to Charlotte Gordon’s NYTBR review, Michael Knox Beran’s Murder by Candlelight “asks us to consider our own hearts of darkness, why we’re obsessed with murder stories, why this obsession matters, and what it suggests about us as a culture and a species.” Beran reaches back into the nineteenth century to find really profound investigations of evil: “To understand why murderers murder, we need to consult the great 19th-century authors, using the likes of Thomas De Quincey, Thomas Carlyle and Sir Walter... Read more

Why Convert?

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

It’s a common complaint that Africans convert to Christianity not for high-minded religious reasons but for self-interested secular reasons. Drawing on the work of C.C. Okorocha on the Igbo, Andrew Walls disputes this way of framing the issue (The Missionary Movement in Christian History): “Religion was always in Igboland directed to the acquisition of power; the gods were followed in as far as they provided it. So the combination of military defeat by the British, the desirable goods and capabilities... Read more

Singulars and Plurals

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

Psalm 1 pronounces a blessing on the “man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked” (v. 1). For some modern translators, it’s a sexist text: Aren’t women blessed when they refuse the counsel of the wicked? “Man” is not an absolutely necessary translation. The Hebrew ‘ish means “man” in contexts where it is opposed to ‘ishsheh, “woman” (Genesis 2:23-25) or where it refers to male characters (Genesis 4:1). It can mean “husband” (Ruth 1:11). But it can... Read more

Housekeeping

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

The TLS reviewer is supposed to be reviewing Marilynne Robinson’s Lila, but along the way gives a lovely description of what makes Robinson’s first novel, Housekeeping, an enduring treasure: “Grave without being heavy, Housekeeping remains Robinson’s most lyrically beautiful book. The text weaves together gothic tropes, mystic invocations of Scripture, and rapturous accounts of the Idaho wilderness, as well as the various pains and confinements of teenage girls growing up in the middle of nowhere. Fingerbone, the town the sisters inhabit, is... Read more

The Scapegoater

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

A couple of weeks back, I suggested that part of Trump’s appeal lies in the fact that he resists the scapegoating dynamics of contemporary media and politics. He refuses to take blame. That, Girard would have us believe, undoes the whole scapegoat mechanism; by unmasking the system, it energizes those who have been scapegoated by the system. Many ordinary Americans feel that they’ve been victimized by American elites, and they relish the spectacle of someone standing up to the victimizers. There’s another,... Read more

Why Evangelical Films Fail

Last updated on: September 1, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

I went to a screening of Woodlawn last Saturday. Directed by Birmingham brothers Jon and Andrew Erwin, the film tells the true story of revival among the players on the football team at Woodlawn High School in Birmingham during a racially tense period of the 1970s. The film focuses on Tony Nathan, the tailback who takes the position from a white teammate and becomes a star. The real-life Tony Nathan went on to play at Alabama and for the Miami... Read more

Shoes and Holy Ground

Last updated on: September 1, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

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In a recent Theopolis lecture, James Jordan pointed to the ritual of Ruth 4 to explain the significance of removing shoes on holy ground. There, a man hands over a shoe as a sign of submission and ceding authority to another. To remove shoes is to acknowledge that God is Lord and we are servants. We can extend this point by looking at Ruth 4 in more detail. Verse 7 says, “this was in former times in Israel concerning the... Read more