Weak Nationalism?

Last updated on: February 24, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Pete Spiliakos makes the counter-intuitive point that Trump’s nationalism will fail politically unless it can become more nationalist: Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ slogan is, paradoxically, insufficiently nationalist. MAGA leaves out African Americans for whom America was not noticeably greater in the past—when, for instance, blacks were prevented from voting because of fraud and terror. MAGA leaves out that huge number of first- and second-generation Americans who are part of the post-1965 immigration wave (a category that includes this author,... Read more

China – Guardian of Western Civ

Last updated on: February 24, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

David Goldman compares “transgressors” Milo Yiannopoulos and Yuja Wang. Milo’s transgressiveness is his essence; Wang, a thirty-year-old Chinese pianist, plays the Western repertoire, her transgressiveness evident in her habit of performing in micro-dresses and revealing evening gowns. (Goldman wrote this just before Milo’s public humiliation.) Despite her Asian roots and her flouting of concert convention, Wang has penetrated and grasped Western music as few Western musicians have or can: Ms. Wang is much more than a digital gymnast, though. She... Read more

Mass v. Manners

Last updated on: February 24, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Catherine Pickstock claims that the rejection of liturgy is central to modernity. Having refused the integrations of liturgy, modernity forges various forms of pseudo-liturgy, pale substitutes to accomplish what the liturgy once did in Western society. One of these pseudo-liturgies is civility: “Once the common ritual basis in which the symbolic order is mediated through subjectivity has collapsed, one has to do something to prevent total intersubjective misunderstanding and conflict. Instead of ritual bonds, which presupposed a shared horizon of... Read more

Lockean Individualism

Last updated on: February 24, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Following Alvin Platinga, Richard Foley summarizes the principles of Locke’s epistemology in three principles (Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others): Evidence (the “obligation to base one’s opinion on one’s evidence,” the latter defined as “what one knows with certainty”); appraisal (the obligation “to appraise the probability of propositions on one’s evidence”); and proportionality (the obligation to “adopt degrees of confidence . . . proportionate to their probabilities on one’s evidence”) (89-90). To be sure, there is much to be said... Read more

Irrationality and Intellectual Flaws

Last updated on: February 24, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Through a series of thought experiments, Richard Foley (Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others) develops a concept of rationality as “a matter of making oneself invulnerable to intellectual self-criticism to the extent possible, of living up to one’s own deepest intellectual convictions and standards.” Rationality thus “requires one to have opinions and to use faculties, methods, and practices that are capable of withstanding one’s own, most severe critical scrutiny” (39). One effect of this definition of rationality is to show... Read more

Undemocratic Education

Last updated on: February 24, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

John Milbank cites what he calls “Socrates’s subversive realization” that “education can never be democratic” (Being Reconciled, 182). This is in part because “the sheer singular uniqueness and contingency of wisdom is unable to subordinate itself to any majority,” partly because “if one is to learn, one must first submit,” in part because all learning comes through the democracy of the dead, from tradition that to which “one must first of all yield blindly” in order to gain “insight into... Read more

How To Read Churches

Last updated on: February 24, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Denis McNamara’s How To Read Churches is an extraordinary book. Subtitled “a crash course in ecclesiastical architecture,” it covers building types, floor plans, sections of churches (nave, apse, choir), materials, windows, altars, ornaments in 256, 6 x 6-inch pages, each of which is stuffed with pictures and diagrams and astonishingly concise explanations. There are nuggets everywhere. Like this, explaining the Byzantine dome-on-cube structure: “In biblical symbolism, the cubic shape represented the renewed Earth while the circular shape of the dome... Read more

Typology, Toleration, and the Metaphysics of Hospitality

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

In an article on “Liturgy, Art and Politics,” Catherine Pickstock argues that the liturgy holds together universal and particular in a unique way. It does this in part because it “extends the liturgical tension between the ideal and the real to an extreme, and yet still holds the polarities together. Thus, it links the most remote unknowable and unpredictable transcendence with the most immediate and particular sacramental presentation. But it is just this combination which allows the universal and the... Read more

Adamic Israel

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

1 Chronicles 27:25–31 lists the officials in charge of David’s stores and lands. Twelve men are named and each has an area of responsibility: 1. Azmaveth, king’s treasuries, v. 25a 2. Jonathan, treasuries in the field, v. 25b 3. Ezri, supervisor of field workers, v. 26 4. Sheim, vineyards, v. 27a 5. Zabdi, treasury of wine, v. 27b 6. Baal-hanan, olive and sycamore trees, v. 28a 7. Josah, treasury of oil, v. 28b 8. Shitrai, herds in Sharon, v. 28a... Read more

Zwingli, Matter, Mind

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

In her meticulous and revealing study of The Eucharist in the Reformation, Lee Palmer Wandel argues that Luther and Zwingli divided at Marburg because their respective positions were incommensurate, incomprehensible each to the other. Specifically, they “divided over the nature of Christ’s body,” but that point of division represented radically different conceptions of body, matter, and God’s relation to creation. Zwingli insisted that “Christ’s body could not be corporeally present in every morsel of bread; indeed it horrified him to... Read more

Which book has the famous phrase, "For everything there is a season"?