Sublimation

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

According to Paul Quinn (in the TLS), Alexander Theroux’s 700-page Darconville’s Cat was a product of jilted love. “Do your worst,” she had said when Theroux threatened to expose her in fiction, and he did: Theroux “encrypted his former lover’s name in acrostics and anagrams, and even cited her as the author of the spoof books whose titles are scattered through the novel, which relentlessly pursues its object through a number of literary modes and rhetorical figures.” The lesson: Don’t... Read more

The Sentence

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:56 pm By Peter Leithart

Bernard Malamud said, “The sentence as object – treat it like a piece of sculpture.” Read more

Protestants and Catholics

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:03 am By Peter Leithart

Benjamin Kaplan’s recent Divided by Faith reveals (in the words of the Economist reviewer) that “there was more religious freedom in the 16th century than after the wars of religion ended a century later. The author tells of the widespread use of Auslauf , whereby Protestants were able to worship outside a Catholic city’s walls; of the clandestine yet accepted Catholic churches in the Netherlands known as Schuilkerken ; and of the practice of Simultaneum , the sharing of churches... Read more

Bhutto’s death

Last updated on: December 27, 2007 at 4:40 pm By Peter Leithart

In a Stratfor report on terrorism in 2008, distributed on December 19, Fred Burton and Scott Stewart predict: “Just over the border from Afghanistan, Pakistan has witnessed the rapid spread of Talibanization. As a result, Islamabad now is fighting a jihadist insurgency of its own in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and the North-West Frontier Province. The spread of this ideology beyond the border areas was perhaps best demonstrated by the July assault by the Pakistani army against militants barricaded... Read more

Bhutto’s death

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:47 pm By Peter Leithart

Doors

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:53 pm By Peter Leithart

Malidoma Patrice Some writes that in the African village where he grew up “houses do not have doors that can be locked. They have entrances. The absence of doors is not a sign of technological deprivation but an indication of the state of mind the community is in. The open door symbolizes the open mind and open heart. Thus a doorless home is home to anybody in the community. It translates the level at which the community operates.” Call me... Read more

McDonaldization

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:10 am By Peter Leithart

McDonald’s is one of the emblems of the bogeyman, globalization. In an essay on McDonald’s in Moscow, Melissa L. Caldwell complicates this picture in a number of ways. In a number of ways, “McDonald’s has been more fully domesticated” and thus has “lost its distinctiveness as something alien and visible and has instead become part of everyday life.” She reports that teenage Russians now identify “McDonald’s hamburgers” as a traditional Russian food, since it is so much a part of... Read more

Pathetic Theology

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

In his recently translated book on theology in a “Lutheran way,” Oswald Bayer emphasizes the element of pathos in theology: “The element of pathos in theology emphasizes that, in the presence of God ( coram Deo ), it is God himself who is active and that we are the passive recipients who ‘suffer’ God’s work, in the sense that we passively undergo it.” Coupled with his emphasis on “the affects,” the pathetic nature of theology “shatters the twofold scheme of... Read more

Pomo Mormons

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:04 am By Peter Leithart

Ex-Mormon Kenneth Anderson has some pointed things to say about Mormons in the December 24 issue of the Weekly Standard . He left the Mormons because “I found I could not continue to say I believed in a religion rash enough to make many historical claims, the testability of which was not safely back in the mists of time in the way that protects Christian belief and worldly reason from meeting up to implode like matter and antimatter.” That’s an... Read more

Confidence in Flesh

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:49 pm By Peter Leithart

Philippians 3:1-11 has been seen as a key anti-NPP text, emphasizing as it does the contrast between Paul’s zeal and his righteousness by law (v. 6) with the righteousness not of his own not derived from the law but a righteousness from God on the basis of faith (v. 9). Watson suggests that the passage proves the opposite. Paul does not contrast his own striving with the obedience of Christ imputed to him. He contrasts everything he had as a... Read more