Unique Minority

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

In a contribution to the 1988 volume, Eliminating Racism, Thomas Pettigrew explained the uniqueness of the African-American experience, which “uniquely combines a long history of being simultaneously an integral part and on the outside of the society” (23). Few of even the most racist Americans consider blacks to be un-American outsiders. They are acknowledged to be Americans, and they think of themselves as Americans: “They are neither immigrants nor aliens. Nor are they a colonized people in the full sense. Their... Read more

Complacent City

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

John condemns harlot Babylon for her luxury. The Greek word is strenos, which is used only once in the LXX, to describe the “complacency” of Sennacherib (2 Kings 19:28). The Hebrew term behind it is sha’anan, which describe the women of Jerusalem (Isaiah 32:9, 11), those who are at ease in Zion (Amos 6:1), the nations that are at ease (Zechariah 1:15). Babylon offends God not only because of her porneia, but because of her arrogant sense of security (Revelation... Read more

Anti-Catholicism and Religious Freedom

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

John Pinheiro’s Missionaries of Republicanism is, according to the subtitle, a “religious history of the Mexican-American War.” He shows how the war was infused with religious themes, linking American Protestantism with Anglo-Saxonism and Manifest Destiny. Near the heart of the religious justification of the war was anti-Catholicism: The United States could fulfill its world-historical role only by fending off the internal threat of Irish Catholic immigration and the external threat of Catholic Mexico. As Pinhiero summarizes the anti-Catholic sentiment: “If Roman... Read more

Cities Ascending and Descending

Last updated on: August 14, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

The Bible ends with a vision of the descent of a jeweled bridal city Jerusalem descending from heaven. Before the city descends, though. a city ascends: Babylon is destroyed and her smoke rises forever and ever. God’s city descends only after the city of man is sent up to God as an ascension offering. The pattern occurs over and over again in the Bible. The first great city, Sodom, ascends in smoke before God begins to build Abraham’s city by... Read more

Race and Rootedness

Last updated on: August 14, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Charles Bambach’s Heidegger’s Roots is an attempt to trace the roots of Heidegger’s affinity for Naziism. The “roots” of the title have a double meaning – both the intellectual background to Heidegger and Heidegger’s formulation of Bodenstandigkeit, “rootedness.” Early on, Bambach summarizes Ernst Bloch’s “caustic and penetrating” response to National Socialism (in Heritage of our Times, 1935). Block scratched Bodenstandigkeit and found “a dangerously political ideology of oppression, exclusion, violence, and terror that he identifies as belonging to an Alemannic-Swabian-Bavarian form... Read more

Sociality in Modern Cities

Last updated on: August 14, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Since Ferdinant Toennies introduced the categories, sociologists have often contrasted the gemeinschaftlich forms of social life in traditional societies with the gesellschaftlich forms in modernity. As Nancy Ammerman explains the distinction, the former are marked by “affectivity, particularism, ascription, and diffuseness. In such communities, relationships had emotional depth, were idiosyncratic, were lifelong, and had functional breadth across many aspects of daily life.” In modern life, by contrast, relationships are characterized by “affective neutrality, universalism, status achievement, and specificity. Here, social relations... Read more

The End For Which God Made Us

Last updated on: August 13, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

“The patristic concept of theosis is the most precise and compendious possible evocation of the end for which God creates us,” writes Robert Jenson in a characteristically dense essay in The Catholicity of the Reformation. It doesn’t imply that the Creator-creature distinction is somehow erased; that difference is “indeed absolute and eternal.” Far from compromising the Creator-creature distinction, theosis is premised precisely on the difference between the infinite God and His creatures: “Precisely because God is the infinite Creator there can... Read more

Myth and the Fragmentation of Humanity

Last updated on: August 13, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Paganism, writes Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (Christian Future), “is best understood . . . as primitive man’s response to the fear of death.” That means not only personal death but also the death of those groups to which he is bound—family, race, country. The problem is that “all finite forms must die,” and when pagans are “stuck in the narrow plot of earth to which his birth roots him, and his soul is therefore haunted by inexorable doom” (64). Myths compensate for... Read more

Anti-Labor, Anti-Catholic

Last updated on: August 13, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

David Sehat argues (The Myth of American Religious Freedom) that the American moral establishment was undermined by the labor movement: “By the last quarter of the nineteenth century the corporation had joined the family, the church, and the school as an institution perpetuating Christian moral authority” (189). This created problems because industrialists were not always exemplars of Christian morals: “Their rapaciousness and their seemingly casual disregard for Christian decency in their treatment of workers required some kind of justification.” To... Read more

Urban Space, Liturgical Space

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

Augustine Thompson (Cities of God) strongly disputes the notion that Italian urban communes of the late medieval period were “secular” organizations. They were religious, so much so that the city was defined and named as the seat of the bishop: “The city: the church. The church: the bishopric. When the north and central Italian cities shook off imperial control and established their unique form of government, the commune, the word they used for city (civitas—citade) said that the municipality was... Read more