Anti-Anti-Formalism

Last updated on: July 28, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In his stimulating study of Augustine, Barth, and contemporary Trinitarian theology, Incarnational Realism, Travis Ables summarizes two tendencies of recent Trinitarian thought: Hegelian idealism and personalism. He sees both “as salutary in their intentions” but in danger of service “as an increasingly formalistic conceptual paradigm to serve idealist or personalistic ends” (11). What might a “formalist” Trinitarian theology be? Ables points to critics of Augustine, who complain that he “posits a formal resemblance between the memoria-intelligentia-voluntas triad . . . and... Read more

Anti-Urban America

Last updated on: July 28, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Steven Conn (Americans Against the City) thinks there’s a contradiction at the center of America’s attitude toward cities. Cities play a huge role in our economy and culture, because of their density of population and the possibilities this opens for public institutions and cultural spaces. Conn examines “two kinds of landscapes that characterize America in the early decades of the twenty-first century. The first is physical, and the second is political. The former is the essentially suburbanized landscape of much... Read more

Melvillian

Last updated on: July 28, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In a short story called “The Fog-horn,” Ray Bradbury wrote of his most important prose-poems: “One day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold sunless shore and said, ‘we need a voice to call across the water, to warn ships; I’ll make one. I’ll make a voice like all of time and all of the fog that ever was; I’ll make a voice that is like an empty bed... Read more

Faith, Science, Wisdom

Last updated on: July 28, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Science and faith seem to be at odds. Many have suggested that’s because believers look to faith to do thing faith can’t do; if we adjusted our expectations about what kind of truth religion gives, science would be freed from the annoyances of the faithful, Tom McLeish (Faith and Wisdom in Science) suggests an rapprochement that works from the other direction. Taking the old notion of science as “natural philosophy” as a starting point, he suggests that the deep roots... Read more

Abominable to Egyptians

Last updated on: July 28, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Moses tells Pharaoh that Israel has to leave Egypt to perform their sacrifice before Yahweh because what they intend to do is abominable to the Egyptians. Why would it be abominable? For starters, bulls were divine – or at least mediated gods – to the Egyptians. Not appropriate for slaughter. Equally important is the fact that Egyptians rarely burned animals in worship anyway. (Neither did Mesopotamians.) They mainly burned animals that represented chthonic powers, and the burning was a sign... Read more

Ritual and Trascendence

Last updated on: July 26, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

K. van der Toorn has a 1989 article summarizing the purity system of ancient Mesopotamia. He describes purity rules as a form of temple etiquette. What makes something unclean is not that it is immoral but that it is displeasing in a particular setting, in this case displeasing before the god. That analogy explains a lot, and van der Toorn’s piece is a masterful summary. Toward the end, though, his argument gets bigger, more speculative, and far less convincing. He... Read more

Holy and Profane

Last updated on: July 26, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Students of Ancient Near Eastern religions and cultures have typically assumed that the peoples of the ANE operated, like ancient Israelites, with a dichotomy of holy and profane. Beate Pongratz-Leisten doubts this, both for Mesopotamia and for Israel. The notion that this dichotomy is a universal religious structures goes back to nineteenth and twentieth century comparative religious studies, which are still cites by biblical and ANE scholars for support. And behind this is, intriguingly, the dominant figure of Schleiermacher and... Read more

Sun and Shield

Last updated on: July 26, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Stephan Maul summarizes the ritual that an ancient Mesopotamian would have to go through to be released from the displeasure of the gods, which was communicated to the person by a bad omen (a barking dog, a growling cat, etc.). The key portion of the rite was played out before Shamash, the god of the sun, who was also the god of law and justice. After all, Shamash sees everything during his circuit through the sky, and even traverses the... Read more

Sun and Shield

Last updated on: July 26, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Crowded Universe

Last updated on: July 26, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Anti-moderns often speak nostalgically of the “crowded universe” of yesterday, when the world wasn’t just matter in motion but full of fairies and sprites and whatnot. It’s a charming picture, but the reality of a crowded universe wasn’t necessarily a happy thing. Stephan Maul writes of ancient Mesopotamia: “If a dog constantly howled and yelped in someone’s house, this boded evil for the owner of the house and his family. The person affected, however, had more to fear than impending doom,... Read more