Porch to Patio

Last updated on: March 1, 2018 at 8:25 pm By Peter Leithart

In a 1975 article in the wonderfully-named journal Palimpsest, Richard H. Thomas traced the movement “from porch to patio,” showing how the change in domestic architecture both reflected and reinforced changes in social structure. The porch, he points out, facilitated conversation between the inhabitants of a house, their neighbours and other passers-by: “It was important to know one’s neighbours and to be known by them. The porch was a platform from which to observe the activities of others. It also... Read more

American Exception?

Last updated on: March 2, 2018 at 1:43 am By Peter Leithart

Alfred McCoy has had a lively life. While still in grad school, he testified before Congress about his discoveries of CIA alliances with drug lords in Southeast Asia. He’s been subjected to surveillance and had his phone tapped. And along the way he has made America’s global power a matter of a lifetime’s study. In his In the Shadows of the American Century, he states the truism: “the word empire is a fraught one in the American political lexicon.” This fraughtness... Read more

Philhellenism, German Style

Last updated on: March 2, 2018 at 1:40 am By Peter Leithart

D. Valdez (German Philhellenism) discerned two forms of interest in Hellenism among German intellectuals of the 18th and 19th centuries: “The first, weighted toward the earlier, Homeric, and more archaic period of Greek life, celebrated a raw, tumultuous humanity, in harmony with nature, reveling in the primitive and natural poetry that was also law, dance that was also social order, and epic verse that flowed out of immediate feeling and lived experience. The unity of poetry, law, dance, epic, and... Read more

Bible and Science

Last updated on: March 2, 2018 at 11:20 pm By Peter Leithart

Stephen Jay Gould famously offered a solution to the religion v. science conflict: Consign each to its separate corner; they belong to separate domains; they don’t conflict because they don’t overlap. Problem solved. Not so fast, says John Lennox (Seven Days That Divide the World). One problem is that Gould’s solution often carries the covert implication “that science deals with reality, and religion with Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and God. The impression that science deals with truth and religion deals... Read more

Unrevolutionary Revolution

Last updated on: March 2, 2018 at 1:41 am By Peter Leithart

In the opening essay to Reflexive Modernization, Ulrich Beck defines the phrase in the book’s title as “the possibility of a creative (self-)destruction for an entire epoch.” This creative destruction is not the product of a crisis but the result of the “victory of Western modernization” (2). Quoting Marx and Engel’s famous description of social worlds melting into air, Beck explains: “If simple (or orthodox) modernization means, at bottom, first the disembedding and second the re-embedding of traditional social forms... Read more

Body Work

Last updated on: February 27, 2018 at 5:47 pm By Peter Leithart

Like his book on the sacraments, Henry de Candole’s brief study of the Eucharist, The Church’s Offering, shows that liturgical renewal is inevitably also a renewal of ecclesiology. De Candole distinguishes between private prayers and the public worship of the church. The latter “is not simply the gathering of a number of people to say their private prayers together” (17). Rather, public worship is an action of the whole body, and in that situation the society takes precedence over the... Read more

Secular Medicine

Last updated on: February 27, 2018 at 7:36 pm By Peter Leithart

In After God, Tristram Engelhardt notes that autonomy is not merely a source of authority in secular culture, but “a cardinal directing value or goal.” In today’s world, one is “obliged freely to choose in conformity with very particular understandings of freedom. The result is that morally condemning autonomously chosen, peaceable, secularly acceptable life-styles and death-styles is considered to be immoral because it involves a failure to accept others as free and equal sources of moral authority and personal moral... Read more

Pharisees and Sinners

Last updated on: February 26, 2018 at 7:33 pm By Peter Leithart

Just before Luke records Jesus’ visit to the home of Simon the Pharisee (Luke 7:36-50), he records Jesus teaching about the responses of the Jewish leaders to His ministry and the ministry of John (7:30-35). They don’t catch the tune of the times, but the tax gatherers and sinners do. That sets up the irony of the scene at Simon’s home: Pharisees charge that Jesus eats with sinners. Does he? You bet: He eats with Simon! This link between Pharisees... Read more

Shakespeare for Lent

Last updated on: February 26, 2018 at 7:26 pm By Peter Leithart

The following essay was first published at Firstthings.com. Lent is a time of renunciation and fasting, spiritual striving, self-examination, contrition, and penitence. It seems a grim and black season of self-accusation. But that’s all superficial. Lent is better understood as a season of Christian comedy. It’s not the glum waiting before the comedy of resurrection begins. Lent is the darkened path that winds toward the rising sun. It takes a playwright to see the comic potential of Lenten disciplines. Shakespeare... Read more

Who Do You Say That I Am? Part 2

Last updated on: February 25, 2018 at 3:36 pm By Peter Leithart

Even after the disciples have seen Jesus calm the storm and walk on the sea, even after they have eaten miracle bread, they don’t understand. They don’t know what we know – that Jesus is Son of God. The problem isn’t a lack of evidence. They have plenty of evidence to draw the right conclusion. The disciples don’t understand because they have a heart problem that produces an eye and an ear problem. They have hard hearts; and because of... Read more