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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

Intelligent universe

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

Frank Vertosick’s Mind: A Unified Theory of Intelligence is out there. He argues that living things are all intelligence, going so far as to suggest that “amoebas may be the smartest things on the planet” and claims that life is intelligence at the molecular level.” In short, “all living things—even those entirely devoid of nervous systems—can (and must) use some form of reason to survive. In fact, I believe that intelligence and the living process are one and the same: to live,... Read more

Elite Education

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

In 2008, William Deresiewicz published an article in The American Scholar on “The Disadvantages of Elite Education.” Drawing on his years of study and graduate teaching at Columbia and his time at Yale, he argued that his education had made him incapable of carrying on a conversation with his plumber, had prepared him for a life of privilege. More, he argued that “Places like Yale, as one of them put it to me, are not conducive to searchers. Places like Yale... Read more

Who is Hillary?

Last updated on: July 22, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

At the New Republic, Anne Applebaum tries to pinpoint the genre of Hillary Clinton’s Hard Choices. Too superficial and sentimental to be a policy book, to guarded to be a memoir, too cliched to give insight into people or events, the book is best read, Applebaum argues, as one of those books that Presidential candidates write when they’re getting ready to run for President. Read in that light, she thinks Hillary has revealed a good deal. For one thing, she reveals... Read more

Atheists in America

Last updated on: July 22, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

The “new atheism” has given atheists in America a new lease on life, but there have been comparatively few studies of atheist beliefs, backgrounds, and experiences. Melanie Brewster’s compilation, Atheists in America, tries to fill that gap by presenting “voices of atheist individuals who represent a diverse array of racial groups, socioeconomic classes, and genders are presented; their relationships to the broader atheist community and outspokenness about religion vary greatly.” The atheists who contribute to the book claim that, despite growing... Read more

Living Buildings

Last updated on: July 22, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Few human creations seem as permanent as buildings. Roman structures are still standing in Europe, and cathedrals have been around for centuries. But we know better. For every erect ancient building, there are dozens of ruins. The boast of Ozymandius is ironic indeed. What might we learn about architecture by looking less at the creative beginnings of a building and more at the endings? Stephen Cairns and Jane Jacobs put forward just such a “perverse view of architecture” in their... Read more

Covenant Atonement

Last updated on: July 22, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Michael J. Gorman expresses some surprise in his The Death of the Messiah and the Birth of the New Covenant that there hasn’t been a developed “covenant” model of the atonement. We have substitutionary, sacrificial, Christus Victor, moral influence, and so on, but no model that uses the biblical category of “covenant” to organize the whole. Gorman overstates the historical point; in Reformed federal theology, the covenant plays a prominent role in atonement theology. Still, a covenant model has never gained... Read more

Perichoresis and Patripassianism

Last updated on: July 22, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Donald Macleod’s Christ Crucified is largely a defense of a traditional Protestant understanding of penal substitutionary atonement. As is typical for Macleod, though, there are surprises along the way. This for instance: While “the unity of the divine Trinity remains unbroken throughout the passion,” it’s still the case that “the very fact of the trinitarian unity has profound implications for the traditional Christian doctrine of divine impassibility. If it is true at the human level that where one member of the... Read more

Framing Isaiah

Last updated on: July 22, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In a 1 993 JSOT article, Anthony Tomasino examines the beginning (1:1-2:4) and end (63-66) of the canonical book of Isaiah, arguing that the two sections share not only vocabulary and themes but also have a common structure. He points, for example, to the references to “heaven and earth” that occur in 1:2, and again in 65:17, 66:1, 22. While “it would appear that the various occurrences of the ‘heaven and earth’ merismus are largely unrelated to one another,” the... Read more

Third Schism

Last updated on: July 21, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

One of the intriguing ideas in Deep Church Rising, written by Andrew G. Walker and Robin Parry, is that the church is currently suffering its “third schism.” The first two are familiar: The schism of East and West during the eleventh century, and the Protestant-Catholic division of the sixteenth. Walker and Parry see a third schism coming in response to the challenge of the Enlightenment. On one side of the tear are churches that remained firmly orthodox; but many churches capitulated... Read more

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