In the December 2009 issue of Poetry , DH Tracy explores the difficulty that contemporary poets have in combining moral passion with aesthetic/sensual interest. Quotations from poems by Frederick Seidel and Robert Hass lead to this observation: “sensuous experiences run up and down them both, and I think it is fair to say that the aesthetic is their dominant mode, by volume. Both of them are in some doubt, though, as to whether pleasure is fundamentally meaningful, and so the... Read more
Toward the end of The Star of Redemption (Modern Jewish Philosophy and Religion) , Rosenzweig finds the star in the human face: “The basic level is ordered according to the receptive organs; they are the building blocks, as it were, which together compose the face, the mask, namely forehead and cheeks, to which belong respectively nose and ears. Nose and ears are the organs of pure receptivity. The nose belongs to the forehead; in the sacred tongue it veritably stands for... Read more
“Come let us reason together,” Isaiah says. An exhortation to logical deduction with the help of syllogism? Certainly, logic and syllogisms are involved, but the verb “reason” ( yakach ) is commonly translated as “argue” (Job 13:15) or “dispute” (Job 13:3; 22:4) or “judge” (Isaiah 11:3) or “reprove” (Job 6:25)) even “punish” (Job 5:17). Reasoning for Isaiah is reasoning together ; it is a personal, social activity, not synapses firing in an individual’s isolated brain. Read more
Is God more concerned with bodies or souls? It’s an imperfect indicator, but a count of the use of terms in Scripture is revealing, perhaps even startling. The word “soul” is used in the NASB just under 300x (a few dozen more than the number of times that the NASB uses “body,” which of course is used for “bodies” other than the individual human body. The word “soul” is used about as much as the word “foot/feet,” about half the... Read more
Robert Jenson writes, “We may note that Augustine’s teaching that the true members of the church are the predestined, who cannot now be enumerated, is the origin of the idea that the true church is ‘invisible,’ though this proposition itself should not be fathered on Augustine. The concept of the invisible church has occasioned little but trouble through theological history, and no use will be made of it in this work. The church is not an invisible entity; she is... Read more
In his recent The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future , Robert Darnton suggests that the development of information technologies brings the Enlightenment aspiration to democratize learning closer to realization. In his TNR review of Darnton’s book, Anthony Grafton quotes Darnton’s description of the philosophes ’ “Republic of Letters”: It was to be “a realm with no police, no boundaries, and no inequalities other than those determined by talent.” In fact, the Enlightenment philosophers, Grafton says, “rarely, if ever... Read more
How do we know things? Experimentation, deduction, observation? In Genesis, knowledge is first associated with two things – with food and with sex. There is a tree of the knowledge of good and evil, whose fruit opens the eyes of Adam and Eve so that they perceive that they are naked. Then Adam knows his wife and she conceives Cain. If we want a strictly biblical answer: Knowledge is eating. Knowledge is sex. Read more
A Tale of Two Cities fits snugly into several contexts. It is an historical novel about a major event of the (then) recent past. Published in 1859, the seventieth anniversary of the beginning of the fall of the Bastille, it depicted an event that was still a touchstone of history and politics for Dickens’s contemporaries. In the years between the Revolution and Dickens’s book, France and the rest of the Continent had been rocked by other revolutions, notably in 1830... Read more
Is the US leadership of the “free world” in jeopardy? Gideon Rachman ( Financial Times ) suggests that the deeper question is whether there is still a free world to be leader of. That is, he points to evidence from Copenhagen and elsewhere that suggests that world democracies don’t necessarily hang together, and thus do not necessarily hang with the US. “Brazil, South Africa, Turkey and India are all countries whose identities as democracies are now being balanced – or... Read more
Is the US leadership of the “free world” in jeopardy? Gideon Rachman ( Financial Times ) suggests that the deeper question is whether there is still a free world to be leader of. That is, he points to evidence from Copenhagen and elsewhere that suggests that world democracies don’t necessarily hang together, and thus do not necessarily hang with the US. “Brazil, South Africa, Turkey and India are all countries whose identities as democracies are now being balanced – or... Read more
Leithart
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