Post-Confederate Memorials

Last updated on: September 21, 2017 at 7:45 pm By Peter Leithart

Joseph Bottum offers a Girardian analysis of the current craze for knocking down monuments (Weekly Standard). Along the way, he explores the origins of the Confederate memorials, observing that “The list of removed statues and memorials seems mostly to prove what busy beavers the United Daughters of the Confederacy were from the 1910s through the 1960s.” This surge in Confederate memory was driven by the political needs to the Democratic party: “it was with Woodrow Wilson in 1912, and especially... Read more

The Cross of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, 3

Last updated on: September 18, 2017 at 5:23 pm By Peter Leithart

III. The Cross and Civilization Jesus gives abundant life. As the Crucified and Risen Man, he also creates new possibilities for history, forms a new epoch of history, the Christian era, and forms the possibility of a new civilization. To understand fully what Rossenstock-Huessy means by this, we need to examine his sketch of ancient social forms. Following Augustine, Rosenstock-Huessy argues that civilizations are formed according to the direction of their loves. Love is expressed in call and response, in... Read more

Unequal Yoke

Last updated on: September 18, 2017 at 5:21 pm By Peter Leithart

Jehoshaphat allies with Ahab of Israel by marrying his son to Ahab’s daughter Athaliah (2 Chronicles 18:1-3). He follows up with a religious alliance, sharing a sacrificial feast with Ahab. That leads to a military alliance, as Jehoshaphat puts Yahweh’s hosts on the field to fight for Ahab. It almost kills him. Jehoshaphat escapes from the battlefield by a hair. You might think Jehoshaphat would learn a lesson about alliances with Ahab, but no. He later makes an alliance with Ahab’s son... Read more

The Cross of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, 2

Last updated on: September 18, 2017 at 5:13 pm By Peter Leithart

II. The Cross in Christian Experience How are the cross and resurrection reproduced in human life since Jesus’ cross and resurrection? Essentially, Jesus incorporated death into life. Christian faith means faith in a God who makes death into a positive feature in life. Rosenstock-Huessy observes that life is suffering, battle, pain, shock, failure, elation. Human beings are always torn, always riven. Much of human life, individually and collectively, is an effort to deal with suffering and death. By being the... Read more

The Cross of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, 1

Last updated on: September 18, 2017 at 6:55 pm By Peter Leithart

For a general introduction to the life and work of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, see my “The Relevance of Rosenstock-Huessy.” “The Crucifixion is the fountainhead of all my values,” wrote the German-American philosopher and historian Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, “the great divide whence flow the processes most real in my inner life, and my primary response to our tradition is one of gratitude to the source of my own frame of reference in everyday life.” He adds, “our chronology of B.C. and A.D. makes... Read more

What Pianists Know

Last updated on: September 13, 2017 at 12:59 am By Peter Leithart

I grew up taking piano lessons. My mother, a college music teacher before her marriage, made sure of that. I didn’t care much for it, and gave it a lot less attention than my free throw technique. Tristesse. I wish I had believed my teachers who told me I’d regret my laziness. Still, I learned some things, not only about music but about life. I suppose musicians who play other instruments have learned similar lessons. One of them is: Look... Read more

Liturgical Tradition

Last updated on: September 12, 2017 at 5:52 pm By Peter Leithart

Maxwell Johnson ends a chapter on “the Apostolic Tradition” in the Oxford History of Christian Worship with a reflection on the challenge of identifying the content of the “liturgical tradition”: “it has become extraordinarily difficult in the light of contemporary liturgical scholarship to say clearly from within this formative period of the first three centuries what this ‘inherited tradition’ actually is. That is, the history of Christian worship in these centuries is not the history of a single tradition of... Read more

Worship and Life in Balance

Last updated on: September 12, 2017 at 2:55 am By Peter Leithart

Worship, Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) says, orders everything in human life: “It is only . . . when man’s relationship with God is right that all of his other relationships . . . can be in good order . . . . Worship . . . is essential for the right kind of human existence in the world. It is so precisely because it reaches beyond everyday life. Worship gives us a share in heaven’s mode of existence, in the... Read more

The Will Behind the Veil

Last updated on: September 12, 2017 at 2:22 am By Peter Leithart

Julian Young offers a neat summary of the Arthur Schopenhauer (the “first European Buddhist”) at the TLS. Schopenhauer’s philosophy can be pinpointed by contrast with two better-known thinkers. Against Hegel’s fantastic “Bildungsroman, a story of the ever-increasing realization of ‘reason’ in human affairs,” Schopenhauer offered a thoroughgoing, relentless pessimism: “Progress, he held, is a delusion: life was, is, and always will be, suffering: ‘the ceaseless efforts to banish suffering achieve nothing but a change in its form.’ Far, then, from being... Read more

Toscanini Rules

Last updated on: September 12, 2017 at 2:36 am By Peter Leithart

“How is it possible,” asks Terry Teachout, “that a man who made his conducting debut when Grover Cleveland was president should still be sufficiently well known and revered that most of his recordings remain in print to this day?” Teachout thinks that Harvey Sachs’s Toscanini: Musician of Conscience comes as close to an explanation as we can expect. Toscanini’s success and endurance can’t be chalked up to technique: “while his manual gestures, whose effect was heightened by the irresistible force of his... Read more