Shiloh Redux

Last updated on: January 24, 2018 at 3:46 am By Peter Leithart

In his temple sermon, Jeremiah warns the people of Jerusalem that Solomon’s temple is going to share the same fate at Shiloh (Jeremiah 7:1-15). Shiloh is where the Mosaic tabernacle was pitched when Israel entered the land. It remained there until the Philistines destroyed it and captured the ark (1 Samuel 4-6). Jeremiah is saying that Gentiles will destroy the temple, slaughter its priests, and take away its furniture. It’s Shiloh redux. Theopolis student John Crawford pointed to the sequel in 1... Read more

Pity the Avant-Garde

Last updated on: January 24, 2018 at 2:26 am By Peter Leithart

Chris Kraus reviews Richard Cabut and Andrew Gallix’s Punk is Dead in the TLS. It was a short-lived movement, with a golden age of “between four and eighteen months,” and was over by 1978. That obsolescence was built-in, as philosopher Simon Critchley says in an interview in the book: “Because of the acute awareness of the fact that punk . . . would become a creature of the very music industry whose codes it subverted, we knew that it was going to be... Read more

Music and the Mind

Last updated on: January 24, 2018 at 2:12 am By Peter Leithart

Musicologist and philosopher Jenny Judge thinks that the mind is more than a machine. Music provides the evidence. According to some philosophers, “if you can’t consciously represent the finer details of a guitar solo, the way is surely barred to having any grasp of its nuances. Claiming that you have a ‘merely visceral’ grasp of music really amounts to saying that you don’t understand it at all. Right?” That’s not the way life works, though: “we allow ourselves to be... Read more

Benjamin in the Book of Chronicles

Last updated on: January 24, 2018 at 3:45 am By Peter Leithart

Benjamin Giffone’s “Sit At My Right Hand” is a study of the tribe of Benjamin in the book of Chronicles and “in the social context of Yehud” (as the subtitle indicates). After sections examining the Chronicler’s setting in the Persian era and the role of Benjamin in the “Deuteronomistic History,” he turns to the role of Benjamin in Chronicles. Few Benjamites have significant roles in the history recounted in Chronicles. Saul and his family are the main individuals. The Chronicler takes... Read more

Bible and Tradition

Last updated on: January 24, 2018 at 3:43 am By Peter Leithart

Few people have had a front-row seat to the various controversies that have rocked the Reformed world since the 1970s. John Frame is one of those few. Irenic and gentle as he is, he has been a target of attack and a spark of controversy throughout his long career of teaching and writing. By his account (in Theology of My Life), he may have inadvertently ignited the Shepherd controversy with a question at an ordination exam. He’s been involved in... Read more

Failure of Patience

Last updated on: January 23, 2018 at 5:14 pm By Peter Leithart

Toward the end of his “Short Treatise on the Lord’s Supper” (sections 57-60), Calvin summarizes the history of Protestant disputes concerning the Supper. He focuses attention on the debate between Luther and Zwingli that culminated at Marburg (1529), and points to the failures on both sides that led to the impasse. Calvin had the advantage of looking back to these dispute, which enabled him to assess the pluses and minuses calmly. He provides an illuminating near-participant perspective on this early Protestant... Read more

Suburban Ponzi Scheme

Last updated on: January 23, 2018 at 1:00 am By Peter Leithart

Charles Marohn, Jr. (Thoughts on Building Strong Towns, 1) calls suburbanization a “grand experiment” in urban planning and growth. His less neutral description is that it’s a “Ponzi scheme.” Since World War II, suburbanization has occurred in several phases. First, “transfer payments” from state and federal government funded “local growth initiatives such as new roads, sewers, industrial parks and community facilities.” Then there was spending on transportation, especially the interstate highway system. The third phase was funded by debt, mostly... Read more

Jonah, Jews, Gentiles, Part 2

Last updated on: January 22, 2018 at 4:57 pm By Peter Leithart

As it turns out, Jonah is not very successful at flight. He goes down, down, down, but as he descends he continues to witness as a prophet. When the Lord throws a storm on the sea, the sailors wake Jonah to ask him to call on his god for help. When the lots indicate that Jonah is the reason for the storm, he confesses that he serves the God of heaven who made sea and land (1:9). It’s an alarming confession:... Read more

Jonah, Jews, Gentiles, Part 1

Last updated on: January 29, 2018 at 6:56 pm By Peter Leithart

Jonah’s life literally goes downhill when he tries to flee from Yahweh, when he refuses to be a light to the Assyrians. Read more

Anti-Hegel

Last updated on: January 22, 2018 at 5:01 pm By Peter Leithart

Mark Lilla devotes a chapter of The Shipwrecked Mind to an exposition of the thought of Franz Rosenzweig, setting him in the context of the 20th-century revolt against Hegel. It was, on the one hand, a revolt against 19th-century Hegelian conceptions of history: “Throughout the nineteenth century, Hegel had been understood, correctly or not, as having discovered a rational process in world history that would culminate in the modern bureaucratic state, bourgeois civil society, a Protestant civil religion, a capitalist... Read more