Words in Time and Place

Last updated on: August 5, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

David Crystal has plundered the Oxford Thesaurus to come up with a compilation of oddities and forgotten words in Words in Time and Place. Crystal chose words based on several criteria: They choice of fields had to reflect the thesaurus as a whole; he wanted to reflect the global character of English; and he searched for words that represented the “types of word-class (parts of speech) and word-formation found in English.” His discussion of the “language of death” includes some gems,... Read more

Singing Ol’ Man River

Last updated on: August 5, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Todd Decker’s Who Should Sing “Ol’ Man River“ isn’t the story of the song’s origins so much as its afterlife. It’s a performance history, but one designed to see how the performances shaped the song and reflect the changing landscape of race in American culture. Decker writes, “‘Ol’ Man River’ has been sung on the radio (again and again), on television . . . , on vaudeville (by black and white, male and female), and even in church. (Black newspapers of the... Read more

Singing Ol’ Man River

Last updated on: August 5, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Sympathizing with Salinger

Last updated on: August 5, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

By most accounts, J.D. Salinger was an unpleasant piece of work. The NYTBR reviewer of Thomas Beller’s new biography, subtitled The Escape Artist, observes that “Salinger’s disturbing icon-sullying behavior has appeared in memoirs by his daughter (describing a selfish urine-drinking monomaniac) and by Joyce Maynard (revealing an unsavory penchant for women so young we really do have to call them girls).” He asks, “what is Beller trying to do here, anyway? He’s trying to understand. His treatment of Salinger’s obsession with... Read more

Atonement and Ecclesiology

Last updated on: August 5, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

NT Wright often complains that traditional Christology works only with the two poles of the gospel story—incarnation and atonement—and ignores the middle. A number of recent writers have complained that atonement theology has been detached from ecclesiology. The two complaints are linked, and they have a common solution. If we read the whole gospel as atonement theology, then ecclesiology is integral to it. Jesus’ work includes not only His climactic death for the of the world, but the formation of... Read more

Heart of Israel

Last updated on: August 5, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Our English translations give the impression that Jesus misquotes Isaiah. Isaiah 29:13 is translated “they remove their hearts far from me,” but Jesus is quoted as saying “Well did Isaiah prophesy . . . their heart (kardia auton) is far from me” (Mark 7:6). Jesus seems to change the plural “hearts” to the singular “heart.” Jesus doesn’t in fact misquote Isaiah, at least not at that point. English translators mistranslate. In the Hebrew of Isaiah 29:13, “people” (‘am) is personified as... Read more

Bowman

Last updated on: August 5, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Allen Kerkeslager argues in a 1993 JBL article that the bowman riding on the white horse is a false Messiah (Revelation 6:2). He looks Messianic, what with his white horse. But the bow is the clue. Kerkeslager connects the bow to Psalm 11:2, 78:57 and other Old Testament texts where the bow is the weapon of the wicked, and then suggests that the bow indicates that the first horseman is Apollo, who would have been a familiar figure to Jews... Read more

Sporting Apocalypse

Last updated on: August 4, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Marcia Shoop is extraordinarily well-positioned to reflect on the theological dimensions of contemporary sports. A college athlete with a PhD from Emory University, Shoop is married to John Shoop, a former college quarterback who has coached both in the NFL and the NCAA. Shoop’s Touchdowns for Jesus bills itself as an apocalyptic look at contemporary big-time sports. She uses “apocalypse” in its original sense: Her book “lifts the veil” on sports, looking at the phenomenon of fan(tasm), sexual stereotyping, racial lines,... Read more

Scandinavian State Formation

Last updated on: August 4, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In recent years, historians have argued that the state didn’t exist in the medieval period. States are born of war, argues Charles Tilly, especially the wars of the early modern era. Annales scholars and their descendants saw tiny medieval duchies and counties as antitheses to centralized state power. Sverre Bagge is skeptical of this new orthodoxy, and in Cross & Scepter, his lucid recent study of the rise of Scandinavian kingdoms, he examines the medieval contribution to the rise of the... Read more

Scandinavian State Formation

Last updated on: August 4, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart