Ancient Sacrifice

Last updated on: May 30, 2013 at 10:48 pm By Peter Leithart

Why did the Greeks and Romans sacrifice? The TLS reviewer of two new books on the subject, Smoke Signals for the Gods: Ancient Greek Sacrifice from the Archaic through Roman Periods and Greek and Roman Animal Sacrifice: Ancient Victims, Modern Observers , summarizes the main theories, which come from Walter Burkert’s Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth The Cuisine of Sacrifice Among the Greeks , edited by Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant. Both Burkert and... Read more

Telos, Mind and Cosmos

Last updated on: May 30, 2013 at 10:28 pm By Peter Leithart

The debate over Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False continues apace. The TLS reviewer observes that Nagel’s “provocation” of a book doesn’t simply demand an explanation for how consciousness arose, but demands to know how consciousness is so central a reality in the cosmos that we know. Not everyone thinks that consciousness is as central as Nagel does, and so some of his arguments won’t touch home with materialists. The... Read more

Tame sex

Last updated on: May 30, 2013 at 8:05 pm By Peter Leithart

In Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation , Roger Scruton pinpoints the ethical and metaphysical issue in same-sex sexuality: “The heterosexual ventures towards an individual whose gender confines him within another world. The homosexual unites with an individual who does not lie beyond the divide which separates the world of men from the world of women. Hence the homosexual has a peculiar inward familiarity with what his partner feels. His discovery of his partner’s sexual nature is the discovery of what... Read more

Writers on Writing and the World

Last updated on: May 29, 2013 at 10:15 am By Peter Leithart

Terry Eagleton is always fun to read, and his TLS review of the correspondence of Paul Auster and JM Coetzee ( Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011) ) is no exception. He begins: “”t is a Romantic delusion to suppose that writers are likely to have something of interest to say about race relations, nuclear weapons or economic crisis simply by virtue of being writers. There is no reason to assume that a pair of distinguished novelists such as Paul Auster... Read more

Culture Wars

Last updated on: May 29, 2013 at 4:45 am By Peter Leithart

Joe Rigney of Bethlehem College and Seminary describes a strategy for Christians in the culture wars at the Trinity House site. Read more

Hatred of the given

Last updated on: May 28, 2013 at 4:22 pm By Peter Leithart

In his Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values: A New Attempt Toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism (Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy) , Max Scheler describes the modern attitude that he finds at the heart of the Kantian system: “This ‘attitude’ I can only describe as a basic ‘hostility’ toward or distrust of the given as such, a fear of the given as ‘chaos,’ an anxiety – an attitude that can be expressed as... Read more

Self-mastery, self-gift

Last updated on: May 28, 2013 at 4:16 pm By Peter Leithart

Karol Wojtyla in full anti-Kantian mode ( Love and Responsibility , 125-6): Persons are essentially self-mastering, sui juris , “and cannot be ceded to another or supplanted by another in another in any context where it must exercise its will or make a commitment affecting its freedom.” OK, so that part is kind of Kantian. Then the anti-Kantian bit: “Love forcibly detaches the person, so to speak, from this natural inviolability and inalienability. It makes the person want to do... Read more

What’s “fundamental”?

Last updated on: May 28, 2013 at 12:07 pm By Peter Leithart

“That man is a ‘body’ belongs more deeply to the structure of the personal subject than the fact that in his somatic constitution he is also male or female.” So says John Paul II in Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology Of The Body (157). How does he know? Because Adam was first created body, and then differentiated into male and female. There appears to be something to this line of reasoning. Paul, after all, says that the... Read more

Unlimited Inquiry

Last updated on: May 28, 2013 at 8:34 am By Peter Leithart

Given the recent history of American conservatism, it comes as something of a shock to realize that conservatives expressed dismay at 20th century developments in military technology. In an essay on “To Whom is the Poet Responsible?” (in The Man of Letters in the Modern World: Selected Essays: 1928-1955 ) Alan Tate is aghast at the reaction to the detonation of the first atomic bomb in 1945. He traced it back to a fundamental theme inherited from the Renaissance: “It... Read more

God of the Gospel

Last updated on: May 28, 2013 at 8:26 am By Peter Leithart

Scott Swain’s question in The God of the Gospel: Robert Jenson’s Trinitarian Theology is about “the relationship between God’s being and God’s self-determination between the Trinity and election, between God’s unfailing character and God’s unfolding covenant that reaches its climax in the gospel of Jesus Christ” (14). The question is posed pointedly by Barth, and answered in the proposals of Robert Jenson and Bruce McCormack, the latter two of whom are the foci of Swain’s study. He doesn’t find either... Read more