One Flesh

Last updated on: January 16, 2014 at 2:26 pm By Peter Leithart

Rosenzweig (Judaism Despite Christianity: The 1916 Wartime Correspondence Between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig, 115) says that “Only what belongs to both man and woman belongs to all men, and everything else has only sectional interest.” Rosenstock agrees, and elaborates: “The lawyer is the perfect type of male understanding that with the help of an analogy can docket night as a particular case of day, and so . . . eventually reduce the world of phenomena to something so like... Read more

Maimed Emancipation

Last updated on: January 16, 2014 at 2:20 pm By Peter Leithart

In one of his wartime letters to Franz Rosenzweig (the correspondence published as Judaism Despite Christianity: The 1916 Wartime Correspondence Between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig), Rosenstock challenges the Rosenzweig’s idea that his love for a particular scholar can be a “merely private affair.” Love above all “can’t remain a private affair” since “one keeps the secret that everyone must have for himself in order to be able to share it with others.” This leads him into a consideration of... Read more

Newspaper of Record

Last updated on: January 16, 2014 at 4:25 am By Peter Leithart

Rebecca Rosen reports at the Atlantic on a century-long error on the front page of the New York Times. The issue number for the February 6, 1898 edition was 14,499; the next day, the issue number was 15,000. Nobody noticed until 1999. At the beginning of 2000, the newspaper announced that Aaron Donovan had discovered the error: “Through the newspaper’s archives, he learned that in its first 500 weeks, The Times published no Sunday issue. Then, for 2,296 weeks from... Read more

Giving Descartes his Due

Last updated on: January 16, 2014 at 4:18 am By Peter Leithart

In Desire, Dialectic, and Otherness: An Essay on Origins, recently reprinted by Wipf & Stock, William Desmond concedes that “the modern self has been excessively subjectivized” (45). But he thinks that, for all its faults, Cartesianism focused attention on an inescapable philosophical problem: “The Cartesian view has the merit that it brings out the inescapability of the problem of self and self-consciousness. We do not address the issue adequately if our strategy is simply to dissolve the Cartesian problem, to... Read more

Bridal land

Last updated on: January 16, 2014 at 4:10 am By Peter Leithart

At the end of Isaiah 61, the prophet (or Zion) rejoices because Yahweh “has clothed me with garments of salvation, and has wrapped me in a robe of righteousness.” The clothing is festal, clothing for a wedding, and Zion is both the garlanded bridegroom and the jeweled bride (v. 10). Zion is head-and-body, a totus Zion. Verse 11 explains (“for,” ki) that Zion has been prepared for a wedding in the same way that the earth sprouts with vegetation and... Read more

Seal of righteousness

Last updated on: January 15, 2014 at 1:43 pm By Peter Leithart

Paul calls circumcision a “seal of righteousness” in Romans 4:11, and that same phrase has historically been applied to baptism. But what does it mean to be a “seal of righteousness”? A seal (Greek sphragis) is an identifying mark. The word is used to describe brands on animals, identifying tattoos on slaves, signs that identify a man’s regiment in the military. To be sealed is to be identified in some way. A “seal of righteousness,” it would seem, is a... Read more

Light of the Nations

Last updated on: January 15, 2014 at 12:27 pm By Peter Leithart

An Epiphany meditation on Isaiah 60 at the Trinity House site. Read more

Be the bee

Last updated on: January 15, 2014 at 8:42 am By Peter Leithart

Bacon compared different sorts of scientists to varieties of insect: “those who have handled sciencehave either been men of experiment or of theory. The men of experiment are like the ant; they only collect and use. Thetheorists are like the spiders who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course; it gathers its materials from the flowers of the garden and the field,but transforms and digests themby a power of its own. Not unlike... Read more

Both royal and pious

Last updated on: January 15, 2014 at 7:41 am By Peter Leithart

For Sedulius Scottus (On Christian Rulers), royal piety was both royal and pious. He urged rulers to practice Christian virtues in their political lives. He encourages kings to a life of prayer, giving several examples of how the Lord “shielded [men] from the dangers of death by holy prayers and divine help rather than by physical arms” (81). Kings should show humility, particularly in their attitude toward priests, illustrating with the famous episode of Ambrose’s “profitable rebuke” to the emperor... Read more

Mice Memory

Last updated on: January 15, 2014 at 6:56 am By Peter Leithart

Virginian Hughes reports at National Geographic that researchers at Emory have discovered that mice inherit the memory of certain smells from parents: They recognize smells “even when the offspring have never experienced that smell before,andeven when theyve never met their father. Whats more,theirchildrenare born with the same specific memory.” Hughes describes the research, published in Nature Neuroscience, in some detail: “The researchers made mice afraid of a fruity odor, called acetophenone,by pairing it with a mild shock to the foot.... Read more

What was the first miracle performed by Elisha?