Politics and Puzzlement

Last updated on: June 19, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Lynn Hunt doesn’t think much of Jonathan Israel’s latest, Revolutionary Ideas. She charges that Israel’s intellectual history lacks nuance and fudges the evidence because he “thinks about philosophy and philosophers in obsessively dichotomous terms.” There are children of light and children of darkness, the former are the radicals, the latter moderates and constitutionalists: “On the one side are Diderot, Helvétius, and d’Holbach, the true radicals because they are materialists, atheists, and allegedly therefore democrats. Without atheism and materialism, Israel claims, ‘it... Read more

Creedalizing history

Last updated on: June 19, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Martin Noth claims that historical accounts in the Old Testament arose from cultic contexts and creedal statements. He claims to be tracing the “historicizing” process. Jeffrey Niehaus says that the process is actually the opposite, a “creedalizing” one (God at Sinai, 77): “Leviticus 23:42-43 tells Israel that at the Feast of Booths all native-born Israelites must live in booths for seven days . . . so that their descendants will know that Yahweh had the Israelites live in booths when... Read more

Sacramental Permeability

Last updated on: June 19, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Andrea Bieler and Luise Schottroff (The Eucharist) speak of “sacramental permeability.” That phrase brings a number of emphases to the fore. For starters it “takes seriously the realities of human bodies as a central part of Eucharistic practice and life.” Once we take the bodies of those who partake of the Body seriously, then we also have to take account of all the things that affect those bodies, “the bread we consume at our kitchen tables, the bread we steal... Read more

Worshipping Trinity

Last updated on: June 18, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Robin Parry’s Worshipping Trinity, now in its second edition, is a solid overview of Trinitarian theology and its implications for worship. He opens with an overview of the Trinity in Scripture and sums of Christian orthodoxy before turning to liturgical questions per se – to Trinity in prayer, song, lament, preaching. Salvation has a Trinitarian structure: “The Father draws us close to his own heart (having reconciled us in Christ’s death) by stretching out the hand of his Spirit, which draws... Read more

This Sweetest Passage

Last updated on: June 18, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

According to Eric Costanzo’s study of John Chrysostom’s theology of alms (Harbor for the Poor), John considered the judgment scene of Matthew 25 as “this sweetest passage” concerning God’s role in almsgiving and the place of alms in the church. Costanzo writes, “John used this text to illustrate further the idea that the systems of the church, while initiated by God, are useless if they fail those in need. It is senseless, he argued, to honor Christ’s body in the... Read more

Gift of the Other

Last updated on: June 18, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Andrew Shepherd travels some ways with Levinas and Derrida in his The Gift of the Other, but like other critics he finds that Derrida and Levinas cannot finally support their ethic of hospitality and welcome. He cites David Wood’s criticism that Derrida’s notion of unrestricted, unbounded hospitality smacks of “hubris” and “seems to deny my situatedness” (85). More fundamentally, “the Levinasian-Derridean account of hospitality stresses ethical asymmetry, and relationships of uni-directionality. Underlying such an account, appears to be the belief that... Read more

How We Read

Last updated on: June 18, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Tim Parks offers this depressingly familiar description of what it’s like to read today. “Every moment of serious reading has to be fought for, planned for. Already by the late 1990s, translating on computer with frequent connections (back then through a dial-up modem) to check email, I realized that I was doing most of my reading on my two or three weekly train commutes to Milan, two hours there, two hours back. Later, with better laptop batteries and the advent of... Read more

Gratitude

Last updated on: June 17, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

You can hear Beeson Divinity School Dean Timothy George interview me about Gratitude: An Intellectual History on the Beeson podcast. Read more

Fourth Political Theory

Last updated on: June 17, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Alexander Dugin, the man sometimes called “Putin’s brain,” outlines a “fourth political theory” in a book of that title. Communism and Fascism have collapsed, and liberalism, the final twentieth-century ideology, turned into libertine postmodernism as soon as it triumphed. The collapse of modern ideology opens space for what modernity excluded, theology included. But for Dugin, the theology that returns isn’t necessary the theology of Christian orthodoxy: “nothing limits the possibilities for an in-depth readdressing of the ancient archaic values, which can take... Read more

God in Ancient China

Last updated on: June 17, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Finding God in Ancient China by Chan Kai Thong and Charlene Fu is one of a number of studies attempting to show that the ancient Chinese worshiped the God of Noah and of Israel. The authors assemble evidence from ancient writings, the Chinese language, ancient Chinese beliefs about God, and ancient Chinese rituals to make their case that “the God spoken of in the Bible and now worshipped throughout the world is the same God that our ancient [Chinese] forefathers... Read more