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Separation to God

Last updated on: February 26, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Klawans (Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple) is disturbed by the gap between studies of biblical purity and studies of sacrifice. Mary Douglas proposed that Levitical purity was not primitive, but systematic, symbolic, and socially functional. Even those who are unconvinced by her proposals has to take Levitical purity seriously as a meaningful system. The same is not true for studies of Levitical sacrifice, which continue to focus on questions about the origin of sacrifice that are, Klawans rightly says, strictly... Read more

Book Release

Last updated on: February 25, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Baylor University Press is hosting a reception to celebrate the release of my Gratitude: An Intellectual History. It will take place at the First Things offices in Manhattan on Thursday, March 6, at 6 PM. For details, click here. Read more

Disarming the Powers

Last updated on: February 25, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

When the Philistines capture the ark, they think Dagon has defeated Yahweh. Yet Yahweh is a power worth deploying as a subordinate to Dagon, so that put the ark in Dagon’s temple (1 Samuel 5). Dagon apparently knows that he’s in the presence of the High God. Every morning, He bows in worship before the ark. Yahweh topples Dagon over so that his head and hands break off. Like the serpent, like Sisera and Abimelech and Goliath, Dagon suffers massive... Read more

Girard’s Evolutionism

Last updated on: February 25, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Jonathan Klawans charges (Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple) that Girard’s Violence and the Sacred is “nothing short of an indictment of sacrificial rituals” (22), which Girard finds “abhorrent” (23). Klawans thinks that Girard’s theory suffers from the same flaws as earlier theories from Robertson Smith and James Frazer. His theory is “antiritualist” insofar as Girard describes all sacrifice as the unjust slaughter of an innocent victim, presumably by a “guilty” worshiper or priest (25). Girard doesn’t think much of purity rules... Read more

Statist Russia

Last updated on: February 25, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Marshall Poe notes in his TLS review that Catherine Merridale’s Red Fortress challenges the traditional statist interpretation of Russian history: “According to her, weak Russian leaders and their cronies concocted the statist theory – in various guises, at various times – simply to justify the consolidation and enhancement of their autocratic power. Ivan the Terrible did it, Nicholas I did it, Stalin did it, and now, she claims, Putin is doing it. This premiss is the weakest part of what is... Read more

conventional cummings

Last updated on: February 25, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

“What do all these typographical high jinks signify?” asks Paul Muldoon about e. e. cummings’s poem about Buffalo Bill in a New Yorker review of Susan Cheever’s E. E. Cummings: A Life. Muldoon suggests several answers: “Perhaps the disregard for punctuation allows the reader a more active role in the process of reading, providing the opportunity to entertain multiple interpretations. The conceit may even play, in an egalitarian spirit, on the idea of capitalization in the economic sense, as if there... Read more

conventional cummings

Last updated on: February 25, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

“What do all these typographical high jinks signify?” asks Paul Muldoon about e. e. cummings’s poem about Buffalo Bill in a New Yorker review of Susan Cheever’s E. E. Cummings: A Life. Muldoon suggests several answers: “Perhaps the disregard for punctuation allows the reader a more active role in the process of reading, providing the opportunity to entertain multiple interpretations. The conceit may even play, in an egalitarian spirit, on the idea of capitalization in the economic sense, as if there... Read more

Date of Revelation

Last updated on: February 25, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

FJA Hort offered a concise summary of the argument against dating Revelation in the reign of Domitian and for a Neronian date in his 1908 study of The Apocalypse of St John I-III. First, the negative case rests on a sense of the limits of the persecution of Domitian: “The last few months of Domitian’s life were a veritable reign of terror, in which many of the noblest Romans were sacrificed. Among them were two near kinsmen of Domitian himself, Flavius... Read more

Date of Revelation

Last updated on: February 25, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

FJA Hort offered a concise summary of the argument against dating Revelation in the reign of Domitian and for a Neronian date in his 1908 study of The Apocalypse of St John I-III. First, the negative case rests on a sense of the limits of the persecution of Domitian: “The last few months of Domitian’s life were a veritable reign of terror, in which many of the noblest Romans were sacrificed. Among them were two near kinsmen of Domitian himself, Flavius... Read more

Being and Saying

Last updated on: February 24, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

The distinction between appearance and reality is an old saw in philosophy. It appears in the letters to the churches (Revelation 2-3) as an opposition between being and saying, a (distinctively Hebraic?) emphasis on the word. Several letters describe the challenge. At Ephesus, there are “saying apostles” who are not apostles. The angel at Smyrna has to deal with “saying Jews” who are not true Jews, and at Thyatira there is a woman Jezebel who is a “saying prophetess.” The... Read more

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