Overcoming Policy Paralysis

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

The US faces policy challenges of gargantuan proportions. Immigration, social security, drugs, race, crime and prison reform, health care, Islamicism and other international challenges. I’d put same-sex marriage, the ethical issues surrounding biotechnology, and abortion high on that list, and some would add environmental issues to the short list. For ordinary Americans, that list poses two challenges. First, each is a hugely complex, apparently insoluble problem. A health care reform bill has been passed, but many doubt whether it will improve... Read more

White Stone

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

Each of the seven letters to the churches of Asia ends with a promised blessing to those who overcome (Revelation 2-3). The letter to Pergamum ends with a triple promise of “hidden manna,” “a white stone,”and a “new name written on the stone which no one knows but he who receives it” (2:17). The reference to a “white stone” has long been a puzzle. What might it mean? We can gain a couple of clues from the context. First, the... Read more

Cosmopolitan Paul

Last updated on: August 6, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Karin Neutel’s A Cosmopolitan Ideal is a detailed contextual study of Paul’s declaration that in Christ there is no more Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female. “Contextual” here means that Neutel examines the use of these and similar contrasts in Greco-Roman and Jewish texts of the first century, on the assumption that Paul was intervening in an ongoing debate about the ideal organization of society. Neutel discovers that the male-female and master-slave binaries are common in discussions of... Read more

Exporting African Religion

Last updated on: August 6, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Jacob Olupona (African Religions, 118-9) tells the remarkable story of Rev. Sunday Adelaja and the Word of Faith Bible Church of Kiev: “Adelaja, a Nigerian, initially and somewhat to his dismay found himself in Belarus (then part of the Soviet Union) on a scholarship to study journalism. While in Belarus, Adelaja helped to found a number of underground churches. Deported by the KGB for his religious activities, Adelaja went to Ukraine at the invitation of Jeff Davis, a traveling evangelist... Read more

Swimming Upstream

Last updated on: August 6, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Laura Choate teaches counseling education at LSU, has a private clinical practice working with teens and families, and is a mother. She’s well positioned to advise how parents can care for girls in what she calls a “toxic culture.” Her forthcoming Swimming Upstream is part cultural and psychological analysis, part parenting handbook. In the opening section, she analyzes the toxicity of contemporary culture—the ways it tells girls, including very young girls, that their worth is based on having a “hot and... Read more

Seated

Last updated on: August 6, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

I recently summarized the appearances of “sitting” posture in Revelation. Lazlo Gallucz develops a similar point in The Throne Motif in the Book of Revelation (251-7). One of the points he highlights is the connection between the harlot’s enthronement in Revelation 17 and the Lord’s in chapter 4: “The following parallels are noted: (1) the visions of both seated figures are prefaced by the invitation, ‘Come, I will show you’ . . . ; (2) in both visions the seer is transported... Read more

The Fall, Basari Style

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

In his very short introduction to African Religions, Jacob Olupona summarizes the creation-and-fall myth of the Basari of Northern Togo and Ghana: “A creator god named Unumbotte who makes man, a snake, and an antelope; he then places them on unrefined earth with one tree. Unumbotte gives them seeds to plant, and one produces a tree that bears red fruit. The creator god eats these fruits without offering any to the human, the antelope, or the snake. The snake convinces the... Read more

In the Temple

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

In his monograph on The Throne Motif in the Book of Revelation (228-9), Lazlo Gallusz lays out a helpful macro-outline of Revelation, which shows the alternation of temple scenes and visions: Temple scene 1, 1:9-20 (Jesus among lampstands) Vision 1, 2:1-3:22 Temple scene 2, 4:1-5:14 (heavenly temple) Vision 2, 6:1-8:1 Temple scene 3, 8:2-6 (angel at altar) Vision 3, 8:7-11:18 Temple scene 4, 11:19 (ark of the covenant) Vision 4, 12:1-14:30 Temple scene 5, 15:1-8 (praise of God after harvest) Vision... Read more

Utopian Modernism

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

Modernism was born in Vienna at the turning point from the 19th to the 20th century. On most accounts, the climate of fin de siecle Vienna was dark and brooding breeding ground for modernist nightmares. Without denying that dimension of Viennese modernism, Kevin Karnes argues in A Kingdom Not of this World that a contrary strain of utopian optimism was equally at work. His subtitle says it all: “Wagner, the Arts, & Utopian Visions in Fin-de-Siecle Vienna.” Mein Reich ist nicht... Read more

Supplication

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

F. S. Naiden is making a career in classics by unsettling settled academic opinion about ancient religion and ritual. He did it in the 2012 Smoke Signals for the Gods, which reintroduced the gods into modern accounts of Greek sacrifice. Earlier (I’m reading Naiden in reverse order!), in Ancient Supplication, he had mounted a similar argument about the practice of supplication. Inspired by ritual studies that begin with Robertson Smith and Frazer, contemporary scholars have claimed that supplication was an “automatic” process.... Read more