The State after ‘68

Last updated on: February 17, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

According to Pierre Manent (Beyond Radical Secularism), May 1968 marked a critical turning point in the political history ofFrance. Despite the persistence of the “Gaullist” party in political power, ‘68 undermined “collective rules, both political and merely social. The citizen of action was followed by the individual of enjoyment. . . . From this moment on relaxation becomes the law of the land. It makes every constraint appear to be useless and arbitrary, in a word vexing, whether in civic... Read more

Passivity and Freedom

Last updated on: February 17, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Ingolf Dalferth thinks we are Creatures of Possibility. By that, he means that “we are creatures in the making whose actual becoming depends on possibilities beyond our control that occur in our lives as opportunities and chances that we can neglect and miss or take up and use” (ix). We are free to choose and act, and we can determine “the mode of our choosing and the way of our acting in moral terms.” Yet this freedom “depends on conditions... Read more

Descartes, Nihilist

Last updated on: February 16, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In her After Writing, Catherine Pickstock argues that the Cartesian Cogito is grounded in a Cartesian ontology, which is in turn related to a Cartesian politics. According to Descartes’ Regulae, she says, “being is defined as that which is clear and distinct, available to absolute and certain intuitions, and ‘perfectly known and incapable of being doubted.’ Existence becomes a ‘simple’ or common notion, which, along with ‘unity’ and ‘duration,’ is univocally common to both corporeal things and to spirits.” These... Read more

Allotments

Last updated on: February 16, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

1 Chronicles 23–27 describes the distribution of responsibilities for the house of Yahweh (chs. 23–26) and the management of the king’s palace and estates (ch. 27). Using lots, David and the priests create “divisions” of priests, Levites, singers, gatekeepers, treasurers, and others. “Division” translates the Hebrew machaloqet, derived from the verb chalaq, “to apportion, allot.” It’s used to describe the division of the land among the various tribes (Numbers 26:53-56; Joshua 13:7; 14:5; 18:2, 5, 10; etc.). The usage has... Read more

Art, Divine and Human

Last updated on: February 15, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

According to Jean-Louis Chretien (Hand to Hand), the notion of God as divine artist and of the world as art comes into its own in Augustine’s Trinitarian notion of ars divina, developed in medieval theology and Baroque art theory. This tradition was not free of ambiguities. Earlier Christian writers had described the world as a work of art, but the theme appears in Augustine not as “a fleeting or circumstantial analogy” but in the form of “a veritable doctrine of... Read more

Christian Unity

Last updated on: February 14, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Despite its orientation to Catholics, Thomas Ryan’s Christian Unity is full of practical suggestions for pastors, lay people, and theologians of all Christian traditions. A few more or less random gleanings. Ryan quotes Cardinal Kurt Koch’s warning that we must not be satisfied with mutual recognition in a situation of division: “On the part of the churches and ecclesial communities of the Reformation above all, the originally envisaged goal of visible unity in the shared faith, in the sacraments and... Read more

Time Out of Joint

Last updated on: February 14, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Everyone who’s read Genesis 1 knows that Hebrews reckoned time from night till day. “Evening and morning, one day” is a refrain of the creation week (Genesis 1:5, 8, 13, 19, 23, 31). Lamps in the tabernacle burned continually (tamid), that is, from evening till morning (Leviticus 24:3; cf. Exodus 27:21), and the cloud of the Lord’s presence remained above the tabernacle “from evening till morning” (Number 9:21). During Passover, not yeast was to be found in Israelite homes from... Read more

Science of Division

Last updated on: February 13, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Plato said that purification is a science of division. So is creation. In Genesis, God forms the formless by separating. He divides (badal) light from darkness to form a temporal structure of evenings and mornings (Genesis 1:4) and waters from water to create a vertical spatiality (Genesis 1:6–7). He delegates the creative work of dividing day and night to the heavenly bodies, which rule and signify in part by separating (Genesis 1:14, 18). After Genesis 1, the Hebrew verb badal... Read more

McLaboratory

Last updated on: February 10, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

McDonald’s looks like a fast food restaurant, but it’s a site of “embedded science,” writes Steven Shapin: “[McDonald’s] sucks in huge amounts of scientific and technological expertise. Science is omnipresent in the corporation that owns or franchises this particular restaurant. Science is outsourced when McDonald’s draws on the expertise of the Marine Stewardship Council to choose the Alaskan pollock for its Filet-O-Fish sandwiches, or the US Department of Agriculture to inspect and grade the beef for its burgers, or the... Read more

When Science Went Modern

Last updated on: February 10, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Writing in the Hedgehog Review (Fall 2016), Lorraine Daston identifies 1890-1914 as the “moment when science went modern” (20). Going modern here involves an acceleration in the pace of discovery and invention: For the scientists, the realization that progress might have its dark side had been germinating since the mid-nineteenth century, when they noticed with consternation that their publications were no longer read after a decade or so and that it had become necessary to revise university curricula and textbooks... Read more

I saw the Promised Land from a mountain but was not allowed to enter it. Who am I?