“The art of man is the expression of his rational and disciplined delight in the forms and laws of the creation of which he forms a part.” This is the first thesis of John Ruskin’s “All Great Art Is Praise,” in The Laws of Fesole. Rationality is essential to the delight. A bird, Ruskin admits, has joy in its song. Yet “a lamb at play, rejoicing in its own life only, is not an artist” because that joy doesn’t involve... Read more
1 Chronicles 26:1-19 lists the names and positions of gatekeepers at Solomon’s temple. The passage is framed by references to the “allotment” or “apportionment” of assignments to Korahites (v. 1) and sons of Korah and Merari (v. 19). Within this frame, the text moves in a complex parallel fashion through different subclans of gatekeeping Levites, with a few verses in the center describing the casting of lots: A. Meshelemiah (Kohathite) and sons, vv. 1b-3 B. Obed-edom (Kohathite), sons, and grandsons,... Read more
In their 1662 treatise on Logic, or the Art of Thinking, Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole question the straightforwardness of the Calvinist logical analysis concerning the Eucharistic “This is my body.” They summarise the argument this way: “Their claim is that in Jesus Christ’s assertion, ‘This is my body,’ the word ‘this’ signifies the bread. Now the bread, they say, cannot really be the body of Christ, and therefore Christ’s assertion does not mean ‘This is really my body’” (71).... Read more
Joseph Ratzinger reflects on Romans 12:1-2 in his Theology of the Liturgy (349-51), which is evident in the Roman Canon’s prayer that “our sacrifice may be rationabilis.” He writes: It is not enough—indeed, it is quite wrong—to translate this as saying that it should become rational. We are asking rather that it may become a logos-sacrifice. In this sense we are asking for the gifts to be transformed—and then, again, not just for that; rather, this petition is going in... Read more
It’s a challenge to get a clear idea of what slackers are really all about. Tom Lutz isolates the dilemma in his Doing Nothing (18-19): The famous or almost-famous idlers, loafers, loungers, and slackers throughout history had to produce work about not working in order for us to know them. And many of them, it turns out, were closet workaholics or reformed slackers. Anything even approaching uncorrupted firsthand testimony is impossible to find. What we often get is something like... Read more
Christian theology has long taught that we are “finite copies of the infinite Creator: created creators” (Dalferth, Creatures of Possibility, 198). Christian anthropology is eschatologically oriented: “Who we are is not determined by our origin; it will become evident in our future” (198). This comes to expression in religious and secular forms, the latter treating becoming as a self-making, the former as “gifting and empowering” (199). Christianity has no quarrel, Dalferth says, with “the activity chain: can, choose, wish, want,... Read more
According to Ingolf Dalferth (Creatures of Possibility), Christianity “contradicts a view that understands human beings in their fundamental dependence, finitude, and passivity, not merely biologically, but anthropologically, as deficient beings, interpreting their absolute dependence as absolute neediness, their finitude as a metaphysical evil, and their experience of the inaccessible as a threat of fundamental meaninglessness.” Such an “anthropology of deficiency” blocks our understanding of gift (105). How so? Dalferth points out that the absence of something is not necessarily a... Read more
In his Rise and Fall of American Growth, Robert J. Gordon argues that the growth rates for the American economy have leveled because the rate of innovation has leveled. And the rate of innovation has leveled, in part, because some innovations happen only once: The flood of inventions that followed the Civil War utterly transformed life, transferring human attention and energy from the mundane to soaring skyscrapers and airplanes. What makes the period 1870–1970 so special is that these inventions... Read more
The title essay of John Summerson’s Heavenly Mansions sets Gothic architecture in a story of the architecture of fancy. He begins with doll houses, and moves to aedicules, originally small buildings holding the image of a god that eventually became purely decorative alcoves. In Gothic, the ornament is turned into the structure: “Instead of the aedicule serving to adorn the structure, the structure was made the slave of the aedicule” (14). One implication of this aedicular interpretation of Gothic is... Read more
Separation of church and state, religion and politics, is not “sufficient unto itself,” argues Pierre Manent (Beyond Radical Secularism). After all, he points out, citizens are believers, believers citizens, and they don’t cease to be one when they take up the role of the other. Separation “suggests the dangerously clear figure of a reciprocal exteriority, as a plan divided by a line, or a three-dimension figure divided by a plane.” It is more realistic to speak of a “reciprocal envelopment... Read more
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