Literature Guide

Last updated on: June 27, 2012 at 4:40 pm By Peter Leithart

Louis Markos packs an awful lot into the 130 pages of his new Literature: A Student’s Guide (Reclaiming the Christian Intellectual Tradition) . The book is an introduction to poetry, with a chapter on metrics and rhyme and another on poetic tropes and imagery. Halfway through, it turns into a chronologically arranged annotated reading list, and not just for poetry. His final chapter sums up critical theories from Plato to postmodernism, with Christian assessment of each. And then he squeezes... Read more

State and Modernity

Last updated on: June 27, 2012 at 3:23 pm By Peter Leithart

In his Guilt and Gratitude: A Study of the Origins of Contemporary Conscience (Contributions in Philosophy) (pp. 37-8) , Joseph Amato follows Karl Polanyi in noting how the introduction of markets, contract, cash, corporations “radically transformed traditional man’s fundamental conception of giving and taking.” Adjusting to this new order left nation-states with difficult choices: “During the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century, governments preoccupied themselves with society for the first time. The requirements of national productivity forced even... Read more

Keeping things together

Last updated on: June 26, 2012 at 3:07 pm By Peter Leithart

In the second book of De Specialibus Legibus Philo writes about the feast of trumpets: “Immediately after comes the festival of the sacred moon; in which it is the custom to play the trumpet in the temple at the same moment that the sacrifices are offered. From which practice this is called the true feast of trumpets, and there are two reasons for it, one peculiar to the nation, and the other common to all mankind. Peculiar to the nation,... Read more

Self-gift

Last updated on: June 26, 2012 at 1:48 pm By Peter Leithart

John Paul II ( Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology Of The Body , p. 168-9 ) notes that parents and children have a natural fleshly unity with one another. In marriage, by contrast, the one-flesh relationship is chosen: This “reciprocal choice . . . establishes the conjugal covenant between the persons, who become ‘one flesh’ only based on this choice.” Thus their union “carries within itself a particular awareness of the meaning of the body in the... Read more

Exile for kids

Last updated on: June 26, 2012 at 6:54 am By Peter Leithart

This is the last in a series of posts summarizing the way I’ve taught an Old Testament survey to kids aged 5-11 this summer. Overall, it’s worked well. We’ve covered a lot, and the kids have learned some of the basic patterns of the Bible. It got more difficult the further we went in the Old Testament, since we were covering less familiar territory. Some of the chants are convoluted and need more work. Briefly, the last session was partly... Read more

Modernist Minoans

Last updated on: June 25, 2012 at 4:14 pm By Peter Leithart

Archaeology seems to be on the margins of cultural history, the province of antiquarians. In her fascinating Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism , though, Cathy Gere traces the impact of Arthur Evans’ excavation and reconstruction of Minoan civilization on modernists from Nietzsche to Freud, Joyce to Robert Graves. Evans convinced his readers that a matriarchal, pacifist, myth-based society was the foundation of Western civilization, the golden age before the fall into Homeric brutality. It wasn’t true, but it was... Read more

A Fresh Political Future?

Last updated on: June 25, 2012 at 9:18 am By Peter Leithart

For the past several decades, Christian activists have been concerned to apply Christian standards to the political and moral issues of our day. I support the effort in principle, and agree with much of the substance. Yet something is missing. In their obsession with discovering biblical standards they haven’t paid sufficient attention to biblical rhetoric. We need not only to explore what God says is right and wrong. We need to be sensitive to the rise and fall of rhetorical... Read more

Eucharistic meditation

Last updated on: June 24, 2012 at 7:07 am By Peter Leithart

Exodus 20:23-24: You shall not make other gods besides me, gods of silver or gods of gold, you shall not make for yourselves. You shall make an altar for Me, and you shall sacrifice on it your burnt offerings and your peace offerings, your sheep and oxen; in every place where I cause My name to be remembered. Yahweh spoke these words to Moses on Mount Sinai. Some forty days later, at the foot of Sinai, Israel broke every one... Read more

Exhortation

Last updated on: June 24, 2012 at 5:31 am By Peter Leithart

The Ten Words deal with perennial sins. Idolaters are everywhere all the time. We all hate, lust, envy. Poison of asps is under our lips too. The Ten Words are addressed to us because they are addressed to everyone. But what use are all these detailed commandments? Why do we need to know that God told Israel not to cut altar stones with tools and not to build altar steps? Can’t we skip ahead to passages that apply to us?... Read more

Tempo

Last updated on: June 23, 2012 at 12:42 pm By Peter Leithart

The opening pages of Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology) (pp. 1-9) are a brilliant reflection on theory formation. Pierre Bourdieu examines the “theoretical distortion” that get embedded in social science, especially anthropology, when the observer ignores the “social conditions in which the science is possible.” This is not merely a repetition of the common anthropological trope about the observer’s presence altering the conditions he observes. It is about the more subtle phenomenon... Read more