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Incipient Modernism

Last updated on: April 29, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Daniel Albright observes in his Panaesthetics that Renaissance perspective “is more unnatural, even seditious to nature, than it first appears” (49). The reason is that “Perspective is less concerned with objects than with space – it lavishes its resources on relations, not on things. In some Renaissance paintings, the thing seems arbitrary, chosen mostly for its usefulness in describing flamboyance of space” (49). He offers an example Perugino’s painting of Christ conferring the keys, in the background of which is a building... Read more

Criticism

Last updated on: April 29, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

William Logan’s Guilty Knowledge, Guilty Pleasure is incisive, full of juicy assaults like these: “Mary Oliver is the poet laureate of the self-help biz and the human-potential movement. She has stripped down the poetry in Red Bird until it is nothing but a naked set of values: that the human spirit is indomitable, that the animal spirit is indomitable, that she loves birds very much, that she loves flowers very much, that even her dog loves flowers very much. . . .... Read more

Criticism

Last updated on: April 29, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

William Logan’s Guilty Knowledge, Guilty Pleasure is incisive, full of juicy assaults like these: “Mary Oliver is the poet laureate of the self-help biz and the human-potential movement. She has stripped down the poetry in Red Bird until it is nothing but a naked set of values: that the human spirit is indomitable, that the animal spirit is indomitable, that she loves birds very much, that she loves flowers very much, that even her dog loves flowers very much. . . .... Read more

Trumpets

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

In Numbers 10, Yahweh instructs Moses to make two silver trumpets. They have several uses. 1) If both are blow, the people assemble at the door of the tent (v. 3). 2) A single blast is a summons only to the leaders (v. 4). 3) A second blast is an announcement that the people should set out, starting with the southern tribes (v. 6). 4) Trumpet blasts functioned as a memorial as Israel went to war, calling on Yahweh to... Read more

Trumpets

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

In Numbers 10, Yahweh instructs Moses to make two silver trumpets. They have several uses. 1) If both are blow, the people assemble at the door of the tent (v. 3). 2) A single blast is a summons only to the leaders (v. 4). 3) A second blast is an announcement that the people should set out, starting with the southern tribes (v. 6). 4) Trumpet blasts functioned as a memorial as Israel went to war, calling on Yahweh to... Read more

Fall from heaven

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

Revelation 12 opens with a tableau of a laboring cosmic mother threatened by a devouring dragon. During the course of the chapter, the dragon’s prey is snatched from his teeth (v. 5) and the dragon is driven from the sky (vv. 7-12). But as soon as the dragon gets to earth, he start pursuing the woman (v. 13). She has surreptitiously left the sky too, fleeing to the wilderness as soon as she gave birth (v. 6). It’s so subtly... Read more

Fall from heaven

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

Revelation 12 opens with a tableau of a laboring cosmic mother threatened by a devouring dragon. During the course of the chapter, the dragon’s prey is snatched from his teeth (v. 5) and the dragon is driven from the sky (vv. 7-12). But as soon as the dragon gets to earth, he start pursuing the woman (v. 13). She has surreptitiously left the sky too, fleeing to the wilderness as soon as she gave birth (v. 6). It’s so subtly... Read more

Tradition and Innovation

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

Wisdom from Yves Congar, as compiled by Brother Emile of Taize in his Faithful to the Future (43): “The problems of the fifth century and the resources of Augustine are not those of the third century and Hippolytus; the problems of the thirteenth century and the resources of Thomas Aquinas are not those of the fifth century and Augustine. Today we find ourselves equipped with resources that are new again and faced with problems and possibilities as yet unknown.” “The Church... Read more

Unintended Capitalism

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

Brad Gregory (Unintended Reformation, 268-9) observes that “like radical Protestants, the magisterial reformers, including Calvin, unambiguously condemned avarice, acquisitive individualism, and any separation of economic behavior from biblical morality or the common good.” The Reformers rejected voluntary poverty, but “their attitudes about the proper human relationship to material things and acquisitiveness are much closer to those of medieval Christianity than to the central assumptions of modern Western capitalism and consumerism. . . . they were well aware that the Bible’s... Read more

Natural Sex Again

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

My friend Rich Bledsoe in response to a recent post on sexual ethics: “it has been pointed out in relation to JD Unwin’s work, that the great, revolutionary destructions of traditional sexual morality (in Russia when marriage was virtually banned as bourgeois, and every form of deviance encouraged, and later in the Weimar Republic where rabid sexual excess and deviance were practiced) failed, and that the great tyrannies that followed re-instituted nearly puritanical sexual codes, in order that the populations might devote... Read more

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