Things are not as they should be, and Judah calls for Yahweh to descend to help. Rip the heavens, shake the earth, boil the sea; tear the three-story house of the universe apart brick by brick, but come down to help! (Isaiah 64). Judah has come to acknowledge that she’s to blame for her own condition. She has not only sinned, but sinned for a long time, sinned so often that her sin has become habitual, a second nature, a... Read more
Joy is the keynote of the new heavens and new earth that Yahweh will create, as Isaiah announces in the chiastically structured prophecy in 65:18: A. Be glad (sus) B. and rejoice (giyl) forever C. in what I myself create C’. for behold I create Jerusalem B’. for rejoicing (giylah) A’. And her people for gladness (masos). Once Jerusalem was filled with the sound of weeping and lamentation, but the new Jerusalem is a city of joy. She exists to... Read more
James ends his epistle with instructions to believers in various conditions of need. The suffering are instructed to pray, the joyful to sing, and the sick to call for the elders who will anoint the sick and raise him up. The three instructions match the three offices of Christ and of believers. Priests pray, kings sing and compose in the Spirit, prophets heal and judge with prayer. It’s no accident that James includes a reference to Elijah, one of the... Read more
John distinguishes between different degrees and sorts of sins (1 John 5): There is a sin that leads to death and another sin that does not lead to death. The substance of this distinction doesn’t concern me here, but rather the form. John’s distinction is not a pragmatic one. Sins are not distinguished according to the number of people they affect, whether they are public or private. He doesn’t distinguish, like Dante, between sins of incontinence and sins of malice.... Read more
Pierre Daniel Huet, seventeenth-century bishop of Soissons, was one of the most respected scholars of his time. A historian of religion and apologist, he was also one of the first critics of Descartes. As Thomas Lennon described it in The Plain Truth, one of Huet’s central criticism was that Descartes was more dogmatist than doubter: “despite Descartes’s initial display of doubt, he emerged as a dogmatist, and that Descartes’s dogmatism was of a very dangerous sort. For ‘although [Descartes] teaches that... Read more
Vanessa Grigoriadis writes a lengthy profile of Justin Bieber at Vulture, analyzing along the way our “sadistic” fascination with watching young celebrities lurch their way toward adulthood. Bieber is the name of a legion: Most of today’s biggest pop stars “were teen stars, or at least made money off music, by 16 (other than country and hip-hop stars—though rappers enter the game early, it takes some time to monetize the flow). I present not only Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, and Christina... Read more
As Guy Stroumsa describes it (A New Science), comparative religion originates from a combined political and intellectual challenge to European thinkers. First, the wars of religion led some to question the primacy of Christianity and to search for some religious (or non-religious) substitute to serve as civil religion. Second, the discovery of the Americas challenged European accounts of history and religion: They had to explain the similarities between biblical and Indian religion, and to explain how the Indians got the... Read more
It’s one of the most dramatic illustrations of the unsurpassability of the Christian era: During the Enlightenment, secular thinkers and Deists turned against the established churches. Their reason was that the churches interfered with their hope for the unity of the human race. As Guy Stroumsa puts it (A New Science, 35), “the religious unity of humanity was used by the deists as an argument against the established churches” (35) He adds, “The discovery of the unity of humankind was also... Read more
Shlomo Sand’s forthcoming How I Stopped Being A Jew is a sharp slap to the brain. He challenges many of today’s tropes of Jewishness – the notion that there is a “Jewish culture,” the exclusive attention to Jewish suffering at the hands of Nazis, the contempt of Yiddish language and culture, the antiquity of Zionist ideology. Most centrally, he challenges the notion of “secular Jewishness,” arguing that it is a recent construct that shares an uncomfortable affinities with the racist theories with... Read more
Justin McGuirk argues in his Radical Cities that Latin American was the site of the “greatest experiments in urban living of the twentieth century. Latin America, let us not forget, experienced mass urbanisation long before China and Africa, which today produce almost panic-inducing statistics of urban population growth. In the 1950s and 60s the equivalent statistics were coming out of Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela and Argentina.” While the rest of the world was moving toward 50% urban, “many countries in Latin America... Read more
Leithart
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In