New Frontiers

Last updated on: June 15, 2013 at 8:08 pm By Peter Leithart

In their contribution to American Space/American Place: Geographies of the Contemporary United States , John Agnew and Joanne Sharp describe the context and import of Frederick Jackson Turner’s famed “Frontier Thesis.” Turner wrote in the context of the downturn of the 1890s, and his argument was partly about the future of American expansion and business. America would have to continue to expand “in order to lower unemployment, reintegrate American labor into the American Dream and thus reduce the appeal of... Read more

Papal economics

Last updated on: June 13, 2013 at 6:16 am By Peter Leithart

Michael Miller’s essay in Christian Theology and Market Economics focuses on “Business as a moral enterprise.” In part, he offers a summary of John Paul II’s teaching on economics and business, especially as expressed in the encyclical Centessimus Annus . As one might expect, John Paul puts business into the context of a personalist theology and anthropology. According to the Pope, this determines the meaning and place of economic freedom: “Economic freedom is only one element of human freedom. When... Read more

Productive Money

Last updated on: June 13, 2013 at 5:51 am By Peter Leithart

In his contribution to Christian Theology and Market Economics , Stephen Grabill reviews the “pre-Enlightenment” history of economic theory. That is to say, scholastic economics. For many economic historians, the notion of a scholastic economic theory is fallacious, and Exhibit #1 is always the scholastic prohibition of usury, grounded in Aristotle’s notion that money is sterile. Grabill notes that there was at least some recognition among later scholastics that money in certain forms had a “seminal” quality. He cites Antonine... Read more

Enter into Joy

Last updated on: June 13, 2013 at 4:44 am By Peter Leithart

Philip Ryken and Michael LeFebvre end their Our Triune God: Living in the Love of the Three-in-One with a chapter on “the Joyous Trinity.” They close the book with this: “Eric Masall insisted that the Trinity is never merely a doctrine but always meant to be a grateful joy. To say that God is triune, he wrote, is to say that ‘there are three divine persons eternally united in one life of complete perfection and beatitude.’ This tri-union ‘is the... Read more

By His Wounds

Last updated on: June 12, 2013 at 3:44 am By Peter Leithart

1 Peter 2 ends with a rich little exhortation to follow the example of Christ’s trustful suffering (v. 21). For starters, we can note the word “example,” which in Greek is hupogrammos . This is a New Testament hapax legomenon , but outside the Bible it refers to a tool used to teach the letters of the alphabet. All the letters would be written on the hupogrammos , and the student would become literate by copying the letters. The word... Read more

Dreams and Visions

Last updated on: June 11, 2013 at 5:36 pm By Peter Leithart

What is Trinity House for? Three things: We aim to advance the reformation of the church and, through the church, to promote the renewal of culture; in furthering reformation, we aspire to be a site of fraternal, charitable ecumenical debate; and to deepen reformation, we want to facilitate theological scholarship, especially in the areas of biblical and liturgical theology. Most of what I describe below exists only in the fevered visions of the Board and Fellows of Trinity House. But... Read more

Surprised by hope

Last updated on: June 10, 2013 at 5:54 pm By Peter Leithart

Bavinck ( Reformed Dogmatics: Holy Spirit, Church, and New Creation ) pre-channels NT Wright: “All that is true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, and commendable in the whole of creation, in heaven and on earth, is gathered up in the future city of God—renewed, re-created, boosted to its highest glory. The substance [of the city of God] is present in the creation. Just as the caterpillar becomes a butterfly, as carbon is converted into diamond, as the grain of wheat upon... Read more

Sons to Yahweh

Last updated on: June 10, 2013 at 3:54 am By Peter Leithart

Pastor Ralph Smith continues his series of essays on Deuteronomy 14 at the Trinity House site. Read more

Reaping the Wind

Last updated on: June 8, 2013 at 3:38 pm By Peter Leithart

What did the sexual revolution sow? What is being reaped? John Witte ( From Sacrament to Contract: Marriage, Religion, and Law in the Western Tradition (Family, Religion, and Culture) ) summarizes with these chilling words: “The wild oats sown in the course of the American sexual revolution have brought forth such a great forest of tangled structural, moral, and intellectual thorns that we seem almost powerless to cut it down. We seem to be living out the grim prophecy that... Read more

Academic-Military Complex

Last updated on: June 7, 2013 at 7:10 pm By Peter Leithart

The American university purports to be an institution dedicated to dispassionate inquiry and the pursuit of wisdom. Since the 1960s, many Americans have identified universities with anti-American radicalism, sexual libertinism, and moral relativism. That is certainly part of the crisis of American higher education. Less publicly, though, scientific and technical research has been coopted to a remarkable extent by the Department of Defense. As usual, money tells the story. $277 million of Carnegie Mellon’s $315 2006 research budget came from... Read more