Near Miss at Marburg

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

In a brief 1949 article in the Lutheran Quarterly, Roland Bainton observes that, far from being stubborn and intransigent at the 1529 Colloquy at Marburg, Luther and the Lutherans “took the initiative in proposing a formula of concord. They confessed that the discussion had opened their eyes and they were prepared to repudiate all of their previous works against Zwingli and Oekolampadius as irrelevant because based on misunderstanding. Zwingli as a matter of fact had advanced from the view that... Read more

Horticultural Anthropology

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

David Smith and Susan Felch devote several pages of their Teaching and Christian Imagination (129–134) to a summary of John Amos Comenius’s seventeenth-century treatise on education, Great Didactic. Comenius starts where humanity starts, with Eden’s garden, and reflects that the garden is not only man’s original location but an image of what human beings are created to be. “For as Paradise was the pleasantest part of the world, so also was man the most perfect of things created. In Paradise... Read more

Authoritarian Gardeners

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

David I. Smith and Susan M. Felch (Teaching and Christian Imagination) want to rehabilitate the symbolism of “gardening” as a model of education. It does require rehabilitation, not least because of Rousseau, who wrote: “God makes all things good. . . . [but] man meddles with them and they become evil. He forces one soil to yield the products of another, one tree to bear another’s fruit . . . He destroys and defaces all things; he loves all that... Read more

The New (Secular) Pragmatism

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

Paul Collier devotes a long, provocative, stimulating TLS review to a sketch of a “new pragmatism.” The review doubles as an essay on the “future of capitalism.” Along the way, Collier discusses the problems of multiculturalism and gives qualified endorsement to nationalism. Multiculturalism must be “bounded,” partly because Western culture deserves “support in the face of less functional rivals.” Partly too because multiculturalism encourages a rootless detachment that is far from utopian: “A world composed of ‘global citizens’ would not... Read more

Fair Nature’s Second Chance

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

“Giving oneself up to sleep can constitute the worst of abandonments,” writes Jean-Louis Chretien (Hand to Hand), “wherein we abandon another person to his solitude and his distress by withdrawing ourselves from the common world and from our community with him. Our eyelids close upon our weary gaze, and our ears become deaf to the other’s voice. One can thus leave someone without even moving away simply by dozing off. The being who is asleep, however physically close he may... Read more

Silence of Painting

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

In Hand to Hand, Jean-Louis Chretien meditates on silence in painting. He doesn’t simply mean that painting is a visual rather than an audible art. Instead, he argues that paintings must not only be viewed but listened to: “To say that painting is silent is to say that we not only see it, but that we listen to it as well. Crossing hearing and seeing Paul Claudel shed light on this issue with great rigor in the formula that serves... Read more

God’s Wounds

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

Jean-Louis Chretien begins his Hand to Hand with a series of meditations on the story of Jacob wrestling with God, and artistic representations of that episode. He quotes Francois de Sales, who wrote: “Our Lord may turn us and sweep us round to the left or to the right; he may, as if with other Jacobs, clasp us tightly, and wrench us in a hundred ways; he may press us first to one side, then to the other; in short,... Read more

God as Artist, Artist as God

Last updated on: February 9, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In Hand to Hand, a meditation on “listening to the work of art,” Jean-Louis Chretien traces the origins of the notion of God as artist and the artist as created. “How did the creative act, which for biblical Revelation properly belongs only to God, come to be thought of thanks to schemas borrowed from the properly human act of production and of fabrication?” Answering this question means following out a double transfer, of “a human model . . . transferred... Read more

A Great Mystery

Last updated on: February 9, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

It is a great mystery. Adam is created from the ground, as are the animals. Unlike the animals, Adam becomes a living soul only when the Lord breathes into his nostrils. Adam is a product of ground and divine breath; he is a child of earth and heaven. Adam’s companion does not come from the creatures who share his earthly origin. Eve is born from Adam’s side. She doesn’t come from earth but from the heaven-earth union that is Adam.... Read more

Divine Double-Talk

Last updated on: February 8, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Day 3 of the creation week was unique, and a turning point in the creation week. When God first made the “earth” and heaven, the earth was tohu-v-bohu, formless and empty, and also dark. Over the course of the creation week, God corrected these imperfections of the original earth. First He calls light into being to chase away the darkness. Then He sets the light and dark into a pattern, structuring the world temporally. By the end of Day 1,... Read more

What baby was placed in a basket in the river?