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Reagan Unbound

Last updated on: August 7, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Ken Adelman had an inside track for understanding Reagan at Reykjavik, the apparently failed but ultimately epoch-making negotiations about nuclear arms between Reagan and Gorbachev in Iceland. According to the NYTBR review, Reagan “spooked Republican foreign policy hands with lofty talk of ‘the total elimination one day of nuclear weapons from the face of the earth.’ In Reykjavik, with Gorbachev, ‘he was pretty much on his own,’Adelman writes, ‘which suited Ronald Reagan just fine.’ . . . Reagan’s own national security... Read more

Reagan Unbound

Last updated on: August 7, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Ken Adelman had an inside track for understanding Reagan at Reykjavik, the apparently failed but ultimately epoch-making negotiations about nuclear arms between Reagan and Gorbachev in Iceland. According to the NYTBR review, Reagan “spooked Republican foreign policy hands with lofty talk of ‘the total elimination one day of nuclear weapons from the face of the earth.’ In Reykjavik, with Gorbachev, ‘he was pretty much on his own,’Adelman writes, ‘which suited Ronald Reagan just fine.’ . . . Reagan’s own national security... Read more

Living Water

Last updated on: August 6, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Jesus promises that those who are thirsty can drink from Jesus. Those who drink/believe not only have their thirst assuaged. They become springs of refreshing, living water – John tells us the water is the Spirit (John 7:37-39). But living water is not only refreshing water. Most of the time, “living water” is the running water needed for purification (Leviticus 14:5-6, 50-52; 15:13; Deuteronomy 21:4; the NASB translates “running water,” but the Hebrew is the rhyming hamayim-hachayyiym). Jesus promises that those... Read more

Living Water

Last updated on: August 6, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Jesus promises that those who are thirsty can drink from Jesus. Those who drink/believe not only have their thirst assuaged. They become springs of refreshing, living water – John tells us the water is the Spirit (John 7:37-39). But living water is not only refreshing water. Most of the time, “living water” is the running water needed for purification (Leviticus 14:5-6, 50-52; 15:13; Deuteronomy 21:4; the NASB translates “running water,” but the Hebrew is the rhyming hamayim-hachayyiym). Jesus promises that those... Read more

Immediacy and Apocalyptic

Last updated on: August 6, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In an insightful reflection on Derrida’s essay on the apocalyptic tone in philosophy, Walter Lowe (Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Philosophy) observes that “Kant has ruled appeals to immediacy to be out of order in the court of reason.” Derrida “inquires whether Kant himself can abide by this rule. It is well and good to require that thinking be consistent, that it stay on track in order to attain its proper goal. But the one who makes this requirement implicitly af?rms that... Read more

Ethics of Resurrection

Last updated on: August 6, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In a typically dense, brilliant essay in the Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology, Milbank argues that without faith in resurrection there is no ethical. Resurrection is the extreme Christian form of the embrace of moral luck, the basis for a Christian eudaemonism. From this conclusion, Milbank teases out three aspects of ethics. First is the hope for the possibility of community: “the mundane, everyday hope that community is possible, that people and objects can analogically blend beyond identity or difference, though... Read more

Water for Sale

Last updated on: August 6, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Karen Piper’s Price of Thirst is an expose of the global cabal of five companies that controls some 73% of the world’s private water supplies. Private companies provide an increasing proportion of water: “By 2025, the number of people served by private water companies is predicted to reach 21%. In the United States, it will reach 39%.” Building on what Piper characterizes as a colonial legacy, these companies are not producing clean water, but rather the conditions for a “dangerous global social... Read more

Water for Sale

Last updated on: August 6, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Karen Piper’s Price of Thirst is an expose of the global cabal of five companies that controls some 73% of the world’s private water supplies. Private companies provide an increasing proportion of water: “By 2025, the number of people served by private water companies is predicted to reach 21%. In the United States, it will reach 39%.” Building on what Piper characterizes as a colonial legacy, these companies are not producing clean water, but rather the conditions for a “dangerous global social... Read more

SuperVulnerable

Last updated on: August 6, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Death, Disability, and the Superhero (forthcoming) by Joe Alaniz is more jargon-ridden than the average cultural study, which is of course saying a lot. That’s unfortunate, because the topic is of some interest. Alaniz summarizes the psychoanalytic, religious, and other studies of the superhero phenomenon, pointing out the obvious that most superheroes are characterized by “strength, control, unboundedness—an utter disavowal of fleshly fragility. As noted by Scott Bukatman,’The superhero body is a body in a permanent state of readiness (this... Read more

Beethoven’s Triumphs

Last updated on: August 6, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Jan Swafford’s biography of Beethoven, Anguish and Triumph, recounts the composer’s physical ailments in squirm-inducing detail: “deafness, colitis, rheumatism, rheumatic fever, typhus, skin disorders, abscesses, a variety of infections, ophthalmia, inflammatory degeneration of the arteries, jaundice and at the end chronic hepatitis and cirrhosis of the liver.” The NYTBR reviewer adds that “When Beethoven’s body wasn’t betraying him, he was destroying himself, sabotaging his most important relationships, succumbing to destructive obsessions. Between these willful and fateful destructions, he squeezed out the... Read more

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