Leithart
Procreation is one of the most basic vocations of human beings. Read more
Procreation is one of the most basic vocations of human beings. Read more
The Peace of Westphalia (1648) has been marked as a turning point in European political history, the origin of the modern international system of sovereign territorial states. Benno Teschke (Myth of 1648) summarizes the thesis: “After 1648, formalized relations between modern sovereign states suspended the criss-crossing relations between heterogeneous feudal actors capped by the hierarchical claims of the Empire and the Church,. The consolidation of exclusive sovereignty, resting on the international monopolization of the means of violence, translated into rulers’... Read more
The Gospel of Mark includes no infancy narratives, but regularly shows Jesus exerting the power of the kingdom to rescue and save children Read more
In his Happiness Paradox, Ziyad Marar explores the sources of “justification.” Humiliation is a uniquely human form of suffering. How do we deal with it? Our strategies for staving off humiliation are strategies of “justification.” Freud offers some possibilities, He “enumerates a range of ways we avoid this kind of suffering, including becoming a hermit or taking up yoga to enjoy the ‘happiness of quietness,’ sublimating instincts into getting pleasure from work (this he reserves mainly for artists and scientists), fantasy,... Read more
Virginia Woolf, atheist though she was, couldn’t avoid religious language when she spoke about her writing. Writing began from “a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words.” It was her “shock-receiving capacity is what makes me a writer.” She expanded: “It is the rapture I get when in writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to what; making a scene come right; making... Read more
Robert Brandom (Tales of the Mighty Dead, 13-14) observes a continuity between Hegel and Kant: Both take concepts as “norms for judgment. They determine proprieties of application to particulars of terms that, because of the normative role they play in such judgments, express universals.” But then Hegel adds this complication: “the only thing available to settle which universal a word expresses is the way that word-and others linked to it inferentially-has actually been applied in prior judgments.” That forces the question:... Read more
Did the Council of Trent allow communion in both kinds, in bread and wine? The answer is complicated. Nathan Mitchell (Oxford History of Christian Worship, 338-9) writes that “After intense behind-the-scenes negotiations, Pope Pius IV authorized communion in both species for German (16 April 1564). In effect, the question of communion in both kinds had become a political football, for Ferdinand I, the Holy Roman emperor, refused to authorize closure of the Council of Trent . . . unless certain concessions... Read more
Reviewing Carlos Eire’s Reformations at First Things, Eamon Duffy claims that “Protestantism ‘desacralized’ the world by accepting an essentially binary division of reality into spirit and matter. That division was expressed in Reformation iconoclasm and the rejection of the notion that material objects—the bread and wine of the Mass, relics, images—could be vehicles of spiritual reality.” That may be true in some limited degree, but it fundamentally misses the force of the Reformers’ protest against medieval customs. They didn’t mount... Read more
“Stay, you are so fair.” That is the sentence that Mephistopheles tempts Faust to utter in Goethe’s poem. To wish to remain in one moment is to abandon the restlessness of human experience. Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse takes the opposing tack: “Making of the moment something permanent” is the central human longing. Woolf depicts two “methods” of achieving this permanent. Mrs. Ramsay finds harmony in life itself. In a 1928 review (reprinted in Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage), Jean-Jacques Mayoux calls... Read more
“That the kiss is the icon of intimacy is so obvious it is in danger of becoming a cliché,” writes Ziyad Marar (Intimacy, 33). “How many romantic films end, or at least peak, with that image? The orchestra swells, the hearts melt in one long embrace. Just as clichéd is Julia Roberts’s prostitute in Pretty Woman, who refuses to kiss on the grounds that it is too intimate” (33). It’s not hard to see why: “Kissing offers to blend and... Read more
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