Genealogy of Rights

Last updated on: June 23, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In The Sacredness of the Person, Hans Joas offers an “affirmative genealogy” of the notion of human rights. He traces the historical origins of the concept not, in Nietzchean fashion, to debunk, but to validate. Isolating the origins of a set of cultural values or practices need not, he insists, lead us toward nihilistic skepticism. He’s right about that. Joas doesn’t think either of the conventional genealogies works. One is secular, tracing the concept of human rights to the abandonment of religious underpinnings... Read more

Beatitude

Last updated on: June 23, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

As the title suggests, Jonathan Pennington’s The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing sees the Sermon on the Mount as Jesus’ instruction in a way of virtue and wisdom that leads to flourishing. As Pennington puts it, “Jesus provides in the Sermon a Christocentric, flourishing-oriented, kingdom-awaiting, eschatological wisdom exhortation.” Pennington aims to show that the theme of “flourishing through wholeness” provides a frame within which the details of the Sermon can be understood. His treatment of the Beatitudes illustrates the “kingdom-awaiting”... Read more

Dear Jane

Last updated on: June 23, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

We may think that Jane Austen has only recently entered pop culture consciousness. We’d be wrong. Devoney Looser’s The Making of Jane Austen traces Austen’s fortunes between 1833, when her novels were republished, and 1975, the bicentenary of her birth. Looser examines book illustrations, dramatizations of the plays, political deployments of Austen, and Austen in the academy. Together, “Highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow culture makers, whether working together or at cross purposes, collectively changed Austen’s persona from that of a marketable author... Read more

Universal Harmony

Last updated on: June 23, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In the course of a discussion of the “harmony” of the economy of grace, the great English Puritan John Owen remarks on the incomprehensible universal harmony of creation (Doctrine of Justification by Faith, 55): There is a harmony, a suitableness of one thing unto another, in all the works of creation. Yet we see that it is not perfectly nor absolutely discoverable unto the wisest and most diligent of men. How far are they from an agreement about the order and motions... Read more

Telos and Idolatry

Last updated on: June 23, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

The loss of Aristotelian/Thomist teleological conceptions of reality is often cited as one of the significant shifts in the formation of modernity. It wasn’t, however, a secularizing move. As David Hawkes points out (Idols of the Marketplace), Bacon saw the notion of a final cause as a species of idolatry. He opposed Aristotle for religious reasons. Idols, Bacon argued, arise within our systems of signification. Bacon writes, “man is but the servant and interpreter of nature: what he does and what he knows... Read more

Marx the Marcionite

Last updated on: June 23, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Joseph Ratzinger (The God of Jesus Christ) discerns an underlying commonality between rigorous asceticism and free libertinism. Both express a hatred of the body: “In the false asceticism that is hostile to the creation, the body becomes a dirty bag of maggots that deserves only disdain or, indeed, ill treatment. Similarly, the basic principle underlying libertinism is the degradation of the body to a mere thing. Its exclusion from the realm of ethics and of the mind’s responsibility means its exclusion from... Read more

Father God

Last updated on: June 23, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Pagans called Zeus “Father,” but, according to Joseph Ratzinger (The God of Jesus Christ), “they meant that Zeus was like human fathers—sometimes really nice, when he was in a good mood, but ultimately an egotist, a tyrant, unpredictable, unfathomable, and dangerous. And this was how they experienced the dark power that ruled the world. . . . The ‘Father’ of the world, as he is experienced in human life, reflects human fathers: partisan and, in the last analysis, terrible” (32). Some... Read more

Generous Good

Last updated on: June 23, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In Enneads 5.143, Plotinus reasons: “If the First is perfect, the most perfect of all, and the primal power, it must be the most powerful of all beings and the other powers must imitate it as far as they are able. . . . Fire warms, snow cools, and drugs act on something else in a way corresponding to their own nature—all imitating the First Principle as far as they are able by tending to everlastingness and generosity. How then... Read more

Unseen Warrior

Last updated on: June 23, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Back in December, Klay Thompson of the Golden State Warriors scored 60 points in a game. That’s a lot. More impressive is the fact that he scored 60 points while playing 29 minutes, for an average of 2.07 points per minute played. The mind-numbing stat, though, is his time of possession: 90 seconds, total. Other players who have scored 60 points have had the ball between 4 and 6 minutes of the game. Thompson scored 60 while controlling the ball... Read more

Ally of Convenience

Last updated on: June 22, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

David Goldman argues that Trump sent “a clear message to America’s Muslim clients in Saudi Arabia: No more double games with non-state actors will be tolerated.” The double games have been going on a long time: “Saudi royal family members are funding every radical madrassa in Asia, including those in Xinjiang Province,” but insists that the US cannot withdraw from the alliance without causing more chaos: “a negotiation . . . is the only alternative to the spread of bloodshed and chaos... Read more