Superstitious liberalism

Last updated on: January 22, 2013 at 5:55 am By Peter Leithart

The bracing premise of John Gray’s Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (xi-xii) is that liberal humanism is grounded in a “superstition” that is “further from the truth about the human animal than any of the world’s religions.” That superstition is a belief in progress, which outside of science “is simply a myth.” Though knowledge advances, there is no evidence, Gray thinks, for the belief that “the human animal” will keep pace. On the contrary, humans are likely... Read more

Puritans and Anglicans

Last updated on: January 21, 2013 at 4:30 pm By Peter Leithart

In his 1976 study of Godly Man in Stuart England: Anglicans, Puritans and the Two Tables, 1620-70 (Historical Publications) , J. Sears McGee uses the law’s “two tables” to distinguish Anglicans from Puritans. Puritans were men of the “first table,” Anglicans of the second. Both worked with the same “palette of sins and virtues” and used the same tubes of paint with the same pigments. But “Anglicans tended to squeeze dry the tubes labelled ‘obedience to crown and mitre,’ ‘material... Read more

The Gift of Guilt

Last updated on: January 21, 2013 at 4:14 pm By Peter Leithart

Visser ( Beyond Fate (Massey Lectures) (CBC Massey Lecture) , 43-4) makes the commonplace observation that Christianity dislodged the honor-shame patterns of the ancient world and replaced it with a sin-guilt nexus. Unlike many, Visser views this as a tremendous gain, even a liberation: “In recognizing wrongdoing as sin, we do not lessen its enormity, but we do deprive it of its fatality . . . . After the admission to oneself of guilt – one’s own guilt, not another’s... Read more

A place at the table

Last updated on: January 21, 2013 at 4:09 pm By Peter Leithart

In her Beyond Fate (Massey Lectures) (CBC Massey Lecture ) (15-16) , the always-stimulating Margaret Visser describes the cultural achievement of making a “place” at table. For us Westerners, “Each diner sits on an upright, separate chair drawn up to a table on which is laid his or her ‘place.’ This is an area bounded by metal slicing, piercing, dipping, and digging instruments, or cutlery; the knife, the fork, the spoon, and sometimes more than one of each. The plate... Read more

Greeks and others

Last updated on: January 21, 2013 at 2:41 pm By Peter Leithart

In the twelfth book his Christian Topography , the sixth-century Italian known as Cosmas the Indian Navigator tries to show that biblical history is consistent with the best records of ancient pagans. “Best” means not -Greek. It’s a highly inaccurate, charming, amusing passage: “But the Chaldaeans and the Medes and Persians, having a somewhat wider knowledge, were instructed by the building of the Tower, and the deluge, and by what happened in the case of Hezekiah and Jonah, and by... Read more

Silent Melody

Last updated on: January 21, 2013 at 2:12 pm By Peter Leithart

Drawing on the work of Christopher Page ( The Christian West and Its Singers: The First Thousand Years ), Wilken ( The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity , 152-3 ) points out that musical notation and the musical staff was an invention of early medieval monks. He quotes a letter from the inventor of the musical staff, Guido of Arezzo, which describes Pope John XIX’s reaction to the innovation: “John, of the highest apostolic seat, who now... Read more

Neither Male nor Female

Last updated on: January 21, 2013 at 2:06 pm By Peter Leithart

Ephrem the Syrian’s hymns were celebrated East and West, and Robert Wilken notes ( The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity , 148 ) that one of his contributions was to compose “hymns especially for women to sing.” Describing this, the Syrian Christian Jacob of Sarug pointed to Exodus 15 and called Ephrem a “second moses” because he taught women “to sing praise with the sweetest of songs.” Wilken quotes a longer passage from Jacob: “The blessed Ephrem... Read more

Gnat theology

Last updated on: January 21, 2013 at 1:57 pm By Peter Leithart

Yesterday, I heard a highly stimulating sermon on gnat theology (Exodus 8:16-18) from my friend, Pastor David Deutsch of Grace Reformed Church in Camarillo, California. Gnats arise from dust; dust is cursed, a symbol of death. From that association, David drew the inference that gnats on man and beast is a figure of the spread of death. Gnats are flying decay, death gone mobile. Because of the gnat plague, everything is clothed in death, covered with dust in insect form,... Read more

On not explaining consciousness

Last updated on: January 20, 2013 at 9:21 am By Peter Leithart

W. Allen Orr reviews Thomas Nagel’s recent Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False in the NYRB . Orr sums up Nagel’s assault on neo-Darwinian reductionism this way: “Nagel insists that the mind-body problem ‘is not just a local problem’ but ‘invades our understanding of the entire cosmos and its history.’ If what he calls ‘materialist naturalism’ or just ‘materialism’ can’t explain consciousness, then it can’t fully account for life since consciousness is... Read more

Talking to Babies

Last updated on: January 20, 2013 at 8:18 am By Peter Leithart

Scott Moonen sent along a report on studies that indicate that babies already respond to language in utero . “”Forty infants, about 30 hours old and an even mix of girls and boys, were studied in Tacoma and Stockholm, Sweden.” The findings: “Babies only hours old are able to differentiate between sounds from their native language and a foreign language, scientists have discovered. The study indicates that babies begin absorbing language while still in the womb, earlier than previously thought.... Read more