Dennetrida

Last updated on: July 24, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

R. Scott Smith takes aim at the fact-value dichotomy in In Search of Moral Knowledge. Along the way, he argues that naturalist materialism makes knowledge of reality impossible. David Dennett is his main target, but he does a nice little jiu-jitsu move that leaves Dennett indistinguishable from Jacques Derrida: “Derrida draws the more consistent conclusion than Dennett seems willing to do, once we acknowledge that there are only takings/interpretations and no givens. Derrida realizes that if there are no givens .... Read more

Dennetrida

Last updated on: July 24, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Making Sense of Scripture

Last updated on: July 24, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Adam Hamilton’s conclusions in Making Sense of the Bible are predictable. Is the creation story true? Yes, but the truth is theological not scientific. Was there really a flood and did Noah really save animals in an ark? Probably not; but the flood story is still true, since it teaches us some essential things about God. The God of the Bible was violent, but the Bible is a human book and so it reflects the “understanding and experience of God” of... Read more

Making Sense of Scripture

Last updated on: July 24, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Shakespeare Today

Last updated on: July 24, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

The Arden early modern drama guides serve as introductions to Shakespeare’s plays. Each volume focuses on a single play, and contains a timeline of the play and its most important productions, a brief stage and screen history, several original interpretative essays, resources for students, and extensive bibliography. Some of the essays trade on academic trendiness. In the volume on Richard III, Rebecca Lemon writes about the “state of exception” in the play and David Wood examines Richard’s “disability.” The prose... Read more

He Shall Crush the Head

Last updated on: July 24, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Bible knowledge is at a low ebb, even among self-professed “Bible-believing Evangelicals.” What’s missing is not only knowledge of the details of the contents of the Bible but a grasp of its overall movement and shape. Joe Anderson and Tim Nichols of have provided a valuable service with their recent release of the teacher’s edition of the first part of their co-authored Bible curriculum, He Shall Crush His Head. Each lesson gives pointers to teachers, lays out objectives, provides an outline... Read more

Among the Sex Workers

Last updated on: July 23, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Tom Bissell’s New Republic profile of William T. Vollmann, journalist, author of legendarily gargantuan novels, painter of nudes and vaginas, is supportive, not to say fawning (though, on second thought, yes, to say fawning). For readers, it will be disquieting. Bissell writes, “When I asked about his infamous fascination with sex workers, Vollmann said, simply, ‘I love and admire them.’ In another interview, he’d gone so far as to describe sex workers as ‘almost like saints.’ Here, even the most liberal-minded... Read more

Lacan in the Stars

Last updated on: July 23, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Aron Dunlap (Lacan and Religion) summarizes Lacan’s theory of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real: “The imaginary is the world that we share with the other residents of the animal kingdom. The symbolic is the space of the properly human world of language, law and order. Lacan associates the real with the eternal order of the stars, and the constellations that so many different cultures, independently of each other and with no apparently respect for realistic approximation, have named... Read more

Deluge

Last updated on: July 23, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Flood stories are widespread in the ancient world, and many studies compare the Babylonian account with the best known account, that of Noah in Genesis. Y.S. Chen’s The Primeval Flood Catastrophe, a revision of the author’s DPhil dissertation, looks at flood traditions from another angle, attempting to trace the development of the Mesopotamian flood tradition prior to its best-known instantiation in Gilgamesh and Atrahasis. Chen justifies a fresh study of this well-trodden terrain by pointing to the wealth of new documentation:... Read more

McLuhan and Frye

Last updated on: July 23, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

B.W. Powe’s Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye is a sassy book about two of Canada’s greatest intellectuals, McLuhan the orator and rhetorician and popular guru, Frye the media-shy theorist of literary archetypes. Powe deals with their relationship as colleagues at the University of Toronto, as well as describing their direct and indirect disagreements. A couple of quotations capture the flavor of their interaction. After quoting Frye’s definition of archetype, McLuhan accuses him of indulging in “textbook cliche,” since Frye “is insisting... Read more