Zizek

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:47 pm By Peter Leithart

With his rock star style and his intoxicating brew of high and pop culture, Zizek seems to be a paradigmatic pomo. Not so, says Terry Eagleton: “If he steals some of the postmodernists’ clothes, he has little but contempt for their multiculturalism, anti-universalism, theoretical dandyism and modist obsession with culture. In Defense of Lost Causes is out to challenge the conventional wisdom that ideologies are at an end; that grand narratives have slithered to a halt; that the era of... Read more

Russian Orthodoxy

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

In a largely negative review of John and Carol Garrard’s Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent ( TNR , December 31), Leon Aron notes the importance of Orthodoxy in contemporary Russian politics: “Orthodoxy is now all the rage among the Russian elite. The formerly godless KGB and Komsomol graduates who rule the country and own much of it are suddenly gripped by religious fervor. Vladimir Putin kept a small private chapel next to his Kremlin office . . . , and undeoubtedly he... Read more

First and Last

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:41 pm By Peter Leithart

Since the patristic period, the parable of the laborers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16) has been detached from its context and understood as a parable about Jews and Gentiles (Irenaeus) or about early and late conversion (Origen). Those are, I think, valid uses or applications of the parable, but the parable itself is set in a discussion about wealth, sparked by the exchange with the rich young man (19:16-22). The unity of the passage is evident in several ways. (more…) Read more

Gnostic and Jesus’ Humanity

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

Several times in her Sacred Power, Sacred Space (Oxford), Jeanne Halgren Kilde makes odd comments about the gnostic emphasis on Jesus’ humanity. Like this: “Although Gnostics had struggled mightily to emphasize Jesus’ humanity, the concept of the holy Trinity, and with it the divinity of Christ, became orthodox. Yet the Gnostics succeeded in the extent to which the awe-inspiring churches encouraged personal encounters with a spiritual being.” This displays ignorance of the most basic elements of Christology. Of course, yes,... Read more

Useful idiots?

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:50 pm By Peter Leithart

Now here’s a wonder. In his recent The Contested Public Square (IVP), Greg Forster says that in the early centuries the church developed “a thoroughly – and irreversibly – apolitical understanding of its own existence and mission.” Irreversible, that is, until it was reversed. Less that forty pages later, Forster is telling us about church and state in early Christian Rome: (more…) Read more

NICE

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

In the UK, they’ve got something called the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. CS Lewis called it: There really is an N.I.C.E. Read more

Painful reading

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

Research for a book project has forced me to read excerpts – as little as possible – of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code . It makes for painful reading, and not only because of Brown’s stupid historical claims. The prose is bad, painfully bad. To read the book is to endure an attack – not a religious attack, but an assault on all standards of literary taste. I have to read it, and that gives me the right to rant.... Read more

Forty-two

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

When the “young men” of Bethel mock Elisha, he calls out two bears that kill forty-two of them (2 Kings 2:24). Later in 2 Kings, Jehu slaughters forty-two relatives of Ahaziah of Judah during his purge of the house of Ahab (2 Kings 10:14). What’s up with that? The young men of Bethel are leaders of idolatry, as our the forty-two relatives of Ahaziah. In both cases, you have Yahweh’s avengers (cf. 1 Kings 19) destroying 42 men, so the... Read more

One Man’s Corruption

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

Is another man’s government administration. The abstract to a 1981 Annales article on clientage in the late Roman empire by Paul Veyne: “In Fourth-century Rome, official posts were purchased from their holders. For officials, who were the equals of the curials and the ‘barons’ (as the ‘simple soldiers’ ought to be called), were landed rentiers, for whom administration was not a livelihood or a career but an additional dignity, or an occasional source of income or an insurance policy for... Read more

Irreplaceable

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:45 pm By Peter Leithart

Richard John Neuhaus was an irreplaceable man. Few public intellectuals ever have expressed themselves with the same warmth, wit, and verve, and few have had the range of experience, interest and insight. How many inner city pastors could also mount a withering attack on Richard Rorty? We will have to go through the Obama years without his help, and that is a great loss. The uniqueness of his mind is only half of it. He was irreplaceably placed. President Bush... Read more