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Wives and Daughters

Last updated on: December 17, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Unpacking her patrilineal account of sacrifice, Nancy Jay notes offhandedly that the genealogy of Genesis 4-5 is “perfectly patrilineal. No women are named; wives are not even mentioned” (Throughout Your Generations Forever, 96). It’s true. Women are pretty much invisible after Eve is named “Living one” and bears sons in 4:1-2. She bears again in 4:25-267, but is unnamed. But there’s a pattern that Jay doesn’t notice, two patterns. The first has to do with the important difference in the... Read more

The Story of Pastor Tom Clark

Last updated on: December 16, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Several months ago, I wrote a First Things essay on the life and ministry of Pastor Tom Clark of Tri-City Covenant Church in Somersworth, New Hampshire. Tom died shortly after that essay appeared, but during his last days we were able to spend a couple of days listening to and recording Tom’s stories about his ministry and the dramatic ways God used his suffering to edify his church. With this video, filmed and edited by Christian Leithart, we try to record... Read more

Right Hand

Last updated on: December 16, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

John describes the angel’s position in Revelation 10 in great detail. The angel straddles land and sea, but for some reason John thinks it important to record that the angels right foot is on the sea and left foot on the land. Assuming that the shoreline in question is the Mediterranean shore of Israel, that means that the angel is facing south, toward Egypt. The angel is portrayed as being in the position of the Lord’s throne, which is in... Read more

Risen City

Last updated on: December 16, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Sanballat hears about Nehemiah’s project of rebuilding Jerusalem after the exile, he becomes angry and mocks the Jews: “Can they finish in a day? Can they revive the stones from the heaps of dust even the burned ones” (Nehemiah 4:2). The taunt is theologically significant. “Finish” is kalah, the verb that describes the completion of heaven and earth (Genesis 2:1-2) and the completion of the tabernacle (Exodus 40:33). Can they remake the world of Jerusalem in a day? Sanballat taunts.... Read more

Hamann’s Hume

Last updated on: December 16, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Johann Georg Hamann, the devout German philosopher of the Enlightenment age, argues that “a kind of ‘faith’ is involved in everyday life when we recognize the real.” In several places, Hamann attributed this insight to Hume. “The reasonings of a Hume,” he wrote, “may be convincing and their refutations clear postulates and doubts; but faith both wins and loses greatly by this most skilful pettifogger and most honourable attorney. Faith is no work of reason, and cannot therefore be subject to... Read more

Impurity – Thinking Makes It So

Last updated on: December 16, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Paul continues to use the language of purity and impurity, but it seems radically altered in his hands. Foods are not unclean; there is no hint that bodily conditions (menstruation, childbirth, seminal emissions) cause uncleanness. Indeed, all things are pure (Romans 14:20). But Paul’s logic is a bit more complicated than simply saying that everything is clean. Some things continue to be unclean to some people. Anyone – here, a believer – who believes that something is unclean, to him... Read more

History of Disgust

Last updated on: December 15, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process traces modern standards of disgust and cleanliness to the development of court society during the Renaissance. Drawing on Elias, William Miller (Anatomy of Disgust) suggests sensitivity to disgust and being civilized are directly proportional. Martha Nussbaum (Hiding from Humanity, 115-6) disagrees rather vigorously. Elias and Miller fail, in part, because their historical perspective is too short, which enables them to tell a Whiggish story about the triumph of clean over disgusting. Nussbaum writes, “ancient Roman sanitary practices... Read more

Shakespeare’s Trials

Last updated on: December 15, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

David Wootton’s TLS review of Quentin Skinner’s Forensic Shakespeare is a primer on Elizabethan law and legal rhetoric. Wootton tells us, “We tend to think rhetoric is about using figures of speech, but that was only a small part of the orator’s training, which relied both on textbooks inherited from classical Rome and on contemporary summaries of traditional teaching. The orator’s core training was quite specific: it was focused on courtroom argument.” And we learn some of “the basic principles of... Read more

Early Ethnography

Last updated on: December 15, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Brian Pennington’s Was Hinduism Invented? includes a brief outline of William Ward’s 1817 treatise on the History, Literature and Religion of the Hindoos. He describes the missionary Ward as one of the “first Europeans to adopt an ethnographic stance” (79). Pennington continues: “He turned from linguistic and textual studies to something closer to an anthropological model that concerns itself not with the textual past but the cultural present, a model not widespread until Bronislaw Malinowski came to champion it in the twentieth... Read more

Impure Feminism

Last updated on: December 15, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Irene Gedalof argues in Against Purity that feminists have been too much in the grip of a binary logic that actually undermines feminism. What she has in mind is the notion that women can be defined in terms of a pure category of “Woman” or “Feminine.” On the contrary, women’s identities are complex and “impure,” irreducible to the single feature of sex or gender. As Gedalof says, “Feminism needs to move beyond analytical approaches to social identity that view ‘women’ only as... Read more

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