Visible Church

Last updated on: January 15, 2013 at 7:21 pm By Peter Leithart

Robert Wilken closes a superb chapter on early Christian art in his recent The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity with a comment on the epochal significance of art in Christian history (pp. 53-4): “‘A cultural event of some importance was taking place,’ wrote the art historian Paul Corby Finney,for we see here ‘a transition from models of accommodation and adaptation that were materially invisible to a new level of Christian identity that was palpable and visible.’ For... Read more

Community of Justice

Last updated on: January 15, 2013 at 7:03 pm By Peter Leithart

The editor of volume of the Summa on the virtues offers this superb and even lovely summary of the centrality of justice in Thomas’s conception of community. God is the source of all communal goods, since “each individual participates because physical, moral, spiritual, cultural values are derived from the causality of God, both direct and participated.” Communities are maintained by the virtues that are allied to justice, but this is no secular order: “Ultimately, it is a sacred work, for... Read more

Society’s Guardian

Last updated on: January 15, 2013 at 6:48 pm By Peter Leithart

Every time I read it, I’m impressed again with Edmund Bertram’s spirited description of the public role of pastors in Mansfield Park . He begins his speech in response to Mary Crawford’s dismissive “a clergyman is nothing.” Edmund replies: “A clergyman cannot be high in state or fashion. He must not head mobs, or set the ton in dress. But I cannot call that situation nothing which has the charge of all that is of the first importance to mankind,... Read more

What Counts As Gift

Last updated on: January 14, 2013 at 8:47 pm By Peter Leithart

In The Second Shift (19), Arlie Hochschild points out that “the interplay between a man’s gender ideology and a woman’s implies a deeper interplay between his gratitude toward her, and hers toward him. For how a person wants to identify himself or herself influences what, in the back and forth of a marriage, will seem like a gift and what will not.” When a woman earns more than a man, and when a man thinks that he oughtn’t be the... Read more

Renaissance and theology

Last updated on: January 14, 2013 at 6:21 am By Peter Leithart

Alexander Murray reviews Ronald Witt’s The Two Latin Cultures and the Foundation of Renaissance Humanism in Medieval Italy in the TLS , and has some high compliments for this sequel to In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni . He commends, for example, Witt’s attention to the French sources of the Italian Renaissance: “The Italian Renaissance is incomprehensible without the ‘twelfth-century renaissance’ first announced by Charles H. Haskins in 1927, radiating from northern... Read more

Eucharistic meditation

Last updated on: January 13, 2013 at 8:17 am By Peter Leithart

John 4: Whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give shall become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life. Jesus is never far from water. He turns water to wine, heals a paralytic at a pool, walks on the sea, tells a blind man to wash his eyes. When He dies, water and blood flow from His side, because Jesus comes not by water... Read more

Exhortation

Last updated on: January 13, 2013 at 7:42 am By Peter Leithart

In many churches, the Sunday after Epiphany commemorates the baptism of Jesus. It is one of the moments when He shows Himself to the world. At the water, the Father declares Jesus to be His Son by giving the Spirit of sonship. When we were baptized, we received a share in Jesus’ one baptism. Every baptism is an epiphany, as the Father shows we are His sons by water and the Spirit. But that’s not all. Jesus also received the... Read more

Cyrillian anthropology

Last updated on: January 12, 2013 at 7:43 am By Peter Leithart

Prior to Cyril, McGuckin claims ( Saint Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy , 224-5), Christian theology oscillated between an unstable “semitic” anthropology that understood human nature as a fragile, unstable combination of soul and flesh, and a philosophical “hellenistic” view that claimed that man was not truly anything bodily but “merely a captive in this alien bodily form, quintessentially a pure mind.” Cyril redefined anthropology in terms of incarnation and arrived at a synthesis of biblical and Hellenistic... Read more

Fully Human

Last updated on: January 12, 2013 at 7:32 am By Peter Leithart

John McGuckin dissents strongly from the notion that Cyril of Alexandria failed to do justice to the “full humanity” of Jesus ( Saint Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy , 225-6). On the contrary, for Cyril, Jesus was the first fully human human. Denial that Cyril did justice to Jesus’ humanity “presumes . . . that ‘humanity’ is to be defined on the basis of our common experience of humankind – a static and reductionist model of analysis arrived... Read more

God With Us

Last updated on: January 12, 2013 at 6:19 am By Peter Leithart

In his The Person of Christ (Contours of Christian Theology) (180) , Donald MacLeod gives this vivid sketch of what it meant for the Word to dwell among us: “For the Son of God, the incarnation meant a whole new set of relationships: with his father and mother; with his brothers and sisters; with his disciples; with the scribes, the Pharisees, and the Sadducees; with Roman soldiers and with lepers and prostitutes. It was within these relationships that he lived... Read more