John ascends through a door in heaven, powered by the Spirit and the trumpet-voice of Jesus (Revelation 4:1-2). A complicated scene greets him in the heavenly temple/throne room. There are several pieces to the tableau: a throne, a rainbow, 24 additional thrones, seven lamps, a sea like glass, and four living creatures. The spatial relations between these things are subtle. The throne is at the center, and it is occupied by an Enthroned One, who is epi the throne. The... Read more
Keith Darden writes in Foreign Affairsthat the main problem in Ukraine is not Russia but Ukraine. It’s dangerous to ignore the fact that Russia is exploiting divisions that have existed in Ukraine for a long time: “inattention to Ukraine’s internal demons reflects a dangerous misreading of current events; the struggle between Russia and the West has been a catalyst, but not a cause. The protagonists in this conflict are subnational regions. The EU association process, and especially the protests, repression, and... Read more
The sacred is Janus-faced, writes Roger Scruton in Soul of the World(15): “Sacred objects, words, animals, ceremonies, places all seem to stand at the horizon of our world, looking out to that which is not of this world, because it belongs in the sphere of the divine, and looking also into our world, so as to meet us face-to-face.” Our encounters with the sacred are moments of “pure subjectivity, in which nothing concrete appears, but in which everything hangs on the... Read more
At the heart of Scruton’s Soul of the World is a plea for a “cognitive dualism” that he sets in opposition to all “nothing but” reductionisms – music is nothing but sounds, painting nothing but pigments on canvas, the world nothing but matter in motion, humans thought nothing but neurons firing in the brain. He argues that “consciousness could not be reduced to any physical process, and that the relation between the human brain and the human mind could not... Read more
“Music,” writes Roger Scruton (Soul of the World, 175) “addresses us from beyond the borders of the natural world” and thus “requires us to respond to a subjectivity that lies beyond the world of objects, in a space of its own.” It’s one of the intimations of a world outside the natural world describable by science. But music is made of sounds, and sounds are vibrations, physical events. Scruton of course knows this, but his point is that there is... Read more
Christians and traditionalists often condemn homosexual activity as “unnatural” behavior. The apostle Paul uses precisely this term. What does it mean? If it is taken to mean that there is no homosexual behavior in the natural world, then the claim is manifestly untrue. As James Neill points out in The Origins and Role of Same-Sex Relations in Human Societies, same sex behavior has been observed “across the range of evolutionary complexity, from fish and reptiles to primates” (14). It is particularly... Read more
Conservatives often point to the 60s as the hinge point in the history of sexual morality. They mean the 1960s. As Faramerz Dabhoiwala shows in his Origins of Sex, the sexual revolution has much deeper roots, in the 1660s and 1760s as much as in the 1960s. Dabhoiwala places the Enlightenment sexual revolution within a history of public discipline. He isn’t satisfied to examine shifts in “the history of private life”; he’s more interested in understanding how sexual activity was located in a... Read more
No sooner is David anointed to be Saul’s successor than he starts plundering the king’s house. His victory over Goliath wins the admiration of the women of Israel, who praise him more highly than they praise Saul. Jonathan recognizes that David will be the next king, and he strips off the signs of his princely status and hands them over to David. David and Jonathan make a covenant, and Jonathan sticks with David even when it puts him in directly... Read more
In 1863, James H. Hackett sent a copy of his Notes and Comments upon Certain Plays and Actors of Shakespeare to the White House. Abraham Lincoln wrote a note of thanks and revealed his Shakespearean reading habits. He had read some “as frequently as any unprofessional reader,” listed several tragedies, and added “I think nothing equals Macbeth.” David Bromwich follows up on this clueto track the effect that Shakespeare had on Lincoln’s political imagination. He observes that Lincoln did speak of “the inward... Read more
Discussing his book Christianophobiaat the fathom journal, TLS religion editor Rupert Shortt suggests that there is a “hierarchy of victimhood” according to which “it’s just not very fashionable to be a persecuted Christian.” Shortt suggests that the reason is partly that Christians follow Jesus’ commandments: “a few years ago a church was bombed in Kathmandu. The culprits might have been Maoist insurgents but were probably Hindu extremists. A friend of mine who is a human rights monitor went out there sometime later, and a... Read more
Leithart
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In