Paul Among Greeks

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:05 am By Peter Leithart

Sarah Ruden’s Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time examines Paul’s ethical pronouncements in the context of Greco-Roman morals and literature, with some interesting results. Paul comes off as revolutionary and subversive on precisely those issues where many believe he is stodgy and prudish. For instance: “Greeks and Romans had many terms to show disgust for a woman who had more than one sexual partner; on the other hand, a man who was erotically... Read more

Getting to Know You

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:42 pm By Peter Leithart

Huston Smith once lectured on world religions to highly enghusiastic officers at Maxwell Air Force Base. Why were they so enthusiastic? he wondered. His answer: “as a unit they were concerned because someday they were likely tyo be dealing with the peoples they were studying as allies, antagonists, or subjects of military occupation. Under such circumstances it would be crucial for them to predict their behavior, conquer them if worse came to worst, and control them during the aftermath or... Read more

All Protestants Now

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:46 pm By Peter Leithart

Charles Keyes writes of the imposition of Western conceptions of “religion”on Asia: “In pursuit of ‘progress’ free from primordial attachments the rulers of [the] modern states[s] of East and South East Asia have all instituted policies toward religious institutions. These policies have been predicated on the adoption of official definitions of ‘religion,’ definitions that (again) have tended to be derived from the West. Indeed, in most Asian cultures prior to the modern period, there was no indigenous terminology corresponding to... Read more

Singing the world

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

What does language do? Refer? Communicate concepts? Affect action? Yes, but, according to Merleau-Ponty, with all of these doings of language it never loses its basic link to gesture and sound. Language never loses its affective dimension, never loses its musicality. James M. Edie sums up the point: “Merleau-Ponty’s first point is that words, even when the finally achieve the ability to carry referential and, eventually, conceptual levels of meaning, never completely lose that primitive, strictly phonemic, level of ‘affective’... Read more

Imagination

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:44 pm By Peter Leithart

Imagination, David Abram argues (following Merleau-Ponty), is not “a separate mental faculty” but “the way the senses themselves have of throwing themselves beyond what is immediately given, in order to make tentative contact with the other sides of things that we do not sense directly, with the hidden or invisible aspects of the sensible.” These anticipations are products of imagination, but are not arbitrary: “they regularly respond to suggestions offered by the sensible itself.” A professional sleight-of-hand magician, Abram illustrates... Read more

Nature, Supernature, Anthropology

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:09 am By Peter Leithart

Having spent time among shamans and magicians in Nepal and Indonesia, David Abram ( The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World ) concluded that magicians are marginal figures, but in a different sense than is usually understood. Rather than standing at the boundary between nature and the supernatural, they typically mediate “between the human community and the larger community of beings upon which the village depends for its nourishment and sustenance. This larger community includes,... Read more

Noah’s Ark

Last updated on: May 24, 2010 at 10:19 am By Peter Leithart

Faustus doesn’t believe that the Old Testament provides testimonies of Christ, and Augustine sets out to prove him wrong: “The ark was three hundred cubits long so that, all told, it was six times fifty cubits, just as all the time of this world is stretched out over six ages, in all of which Christ never ceases to be proclaimed. in five ages he was predicted by prophecy; in the sixth he had been made known everywhere by the gospel.... Read more

Noah’s Ark

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:09 am By Peter Leithart

Sermon notes

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:02 am By Peter Leithart

INTRODUCTION No family exists in isolation from the rest of the world. Our children have friends, many go to school; eventually they will leave home for good. We should train them so that when they leave, they are led out by the Spirit. THE TEXT “There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus... Read more

Baptismal meditation

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:47 pm By Peter Leithart

Romans 8:10-11: If Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, yet the spirit is alive because of righteousness. But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you. Who raised Jesus from the dead? The New Testament gives different answers to that question. Jesus claimed authority to... Read more