Bronze

Last updated on: December 6, 2012 at 4:43 pm By Peter Leithart

The December 20 edition of the NYRB has some arresting photos of bronze statues in a London Royal Academy exhibit, made all the more impressive by the reviewer Andrew Butterfield’s description of the process of bronze sculpture: “Bronze is very different from most materials of sculpture. The other substances commonly used in pre-modern statuary, such as stone, wood, and clay, are natural materials. But bronze is a human product, made by melting copper together with one or more other metals... Read more

1950s redux?

Last updated on: December 6, 2012 at 12:10 pm By Peter Leithart

Poor Camille Paglia. She’s worked herself into a froth. Writing in The Hollywood Reporter , she complains s(n)eeringly that the latest crop of women stars have betrayed feminism. With Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, and their crowd of new power women, we’re back “to the demure girly-girl days of the white-bread 1950s.” Only not quite. Paglia spots a “yawning chasm between [Perry’s] fresh, flawless 1950s girliness, bedecked in cartoonish floral colors, and the overt raunch of her lyrics, with their dissipated... Read more

Before Economics

Last updated on: December 5, 2012 at 2:30 pm By Peter Leithart

“None of our Western [economic] distinctions was completely absent in antiquity,” writes Sitta van Reden near the end of her Exchange in Ancient Greece (218). Yet, because of a different configuration of society the distinctions we take for granted were not so ingrained: “Rigid status boundaries between citizens and outsiders, free men and slaves and men and women made it impossible to think of humans as never the objects of exchange or property. The idea that agrarian produce was the... Read more

Persons and Relations

Last updated on: December 5, 2012 at 2:24 pm By Peter Leithart

Morwenna Ludlow ( Gregory of Nyssa, Ancient and (Post)modern , 41-2) has some critical things to say about Robert Jenson’s use of Gregory of Nyssa, but she thinks he gets some things right: “Jenson is notable among systematic theologians in distinguishing clearly between the persons (or identities) of the Godhead ( pragmata , hypostases : Father, Son and Spirit) and the characteristics which distinguish the persons ( idiomata , gnorismata : Fatherhood, being begotten, and proceeding). Gregory’s view, it seems... Read more

My cat Alice

Last updated on: December 5, 2012 at 7:21 am By Peter Leithart

For I will consider my cat Alice. (Not my cat; my daughter’s, though I pay her keep.) Alice is a servant of the living God duly and daily serving him. Mostly she serves by pouncing on my bed at the first glance of the glory of God in the East, wreaths her body with elegant quickness until she finds a place to rest, purring all the while in loud thankfulness. Today, she served me as a handmaid of philosophy. (more…) Read more

Filial Rain

Last updated on: December 5, 2012 at 7:04 am By Peter Leithart

God is the Father of precipitation, Job says (Job 38:25-30). Rain is filial, the Father’s nourishing gift to the world. The same imagery appears elsewhere. The righteous king is “like rain upon the mown grass” (Psalm 72:6), and the king’s “favor is like a cloud with the spring rain” (Proverbs 16:15). Yahweh “rained down manna upon [Israel] to eat . . . He rained meat upon [Israel] like dust” (Psalm 78:24, 27), and we know that the rain of manna... Read more

Jesus’ consciousness and ours

Last updated on: December 4, 2012 at 3:43 pm By Peter Leithart

In Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ (19), TF Torrance warns about the inevitably psychologizing and anthropologization that occurs when “the witness of the evangelists and the other New Testament authors reposes ultimately upon Jesus’ own self-consciousness.” In the first place, such an approach “isolates his consciousness from his concrete witness to himself in word and deed” and, in the second place, “it excludes “the historical and ontological from their place in the basic fact upon which our interpretation... Read more

Gentleness of God

Last updated on: December 4, 2012 at 11:19 am By Peter Leithart

Barth cites this passage from the Epistle to Diognetus to emphasize the gentleness of God in His self-revelation in the Son. God sent His very son: “He did not, as one might have imagined, send to men any servant, or angel, or ruler, or any one of those who bear sway over earthly things, or one of those to whom the government of things in the heavens has been entrusted, but the very Creator and Fashioner of all things—by whom... Read more

Pro nobis, in se

Last updated on: December 4, 2012 at 10:57 am By Peter Leithart

For Barth ( Church Dogmatics The Doctrine of the Word of God, Volume 1, Part 2: The Revelation of God; Holy Scripture: The Proclamation of the Church , 34), the incarnation reveals that God is free for us, pro nobis . But Trinitarian theology is the affirmation that is freedom is grounded in the inherent freedom of the Trinity, His freedom in se . The latter is the ground of the former: “Because God in his one nature is not... Read more

Trinity Institute: Milbank Speaks

Last updated on: December 4, 2012 at 2:05 am By Peter Leithart

Peter Leithart’s new project is highly exciting and deserves the widest support. As one of the leading theologians of our times, Leithart has uniquely managed to combine fresh Biblical and historical scholarship with cultural engagement at every level from high to popular. He has also shown that genuine orthodoxy coincides with genuine rigor and genuine human and social relevance. For all these reasons his work points naturally towards a wider institutional expansion. I wish this venture every success. John Milbank,... Read more