Peter J. Leithart

Roger Lundin’s Culture of Interpretation (1993)is a very thoughtful discussion of the American cultural context of postmodernism. He argues persuasively for a strong continuity between the Enlightenment and Romanticism (both look to the transcedent self, albeit in different ways, as the . . . . Continue Reading »

2 Kings 9:33-34: Jehu said, Throw her down. So they threw her down, and some of her blood was sprinkled on the wall and on the horses, and he trampled her under foot. When he came in, he ate and drank. How callous, we think. How could Jehu move directly from trampling the queen of Israel under the . . . . Continue Reading »

Once there was a little bumblebee who was very clumsy. When he flew, he didn’t say “Buzz,” like most bees. He said “Zubb.” When he aimed for a flower, he often missed and found himself trying to suck nectar from a lamppost or a fireplug. And he was always tripping over . . . . Continue Reading »

Churches have a life-cycle just as individuals do. Both individuals and churches begin life in helpless dependence, slowly learn to do things for ourselves, and eventually take responsibility not only for ourselves but for others. Trinity Reformed church was born in August 2003 as a church plant . . . . Continue Reading »

Not long ago, Frank Schaeffer frothed out a piece of mind-boggling stupidity in the San Francisco Chronicle attacking Pope Benedict XVI as a fundamentalist. It says something about Ratzinger’s learning that he is the author of 86 books, 470 articles, and has been a member of the Academie des . . . . Continue Reading »

David Klinghoffer argues in his Why the Jews Rejeced Jesus that pagan Europeans would not have embraced Jesus if the Jews had not rejected Him: “If you value the great achievements of Western civilization and of American society, thank the Jews for their decision to cleave to their ancestral . . . . Continue Reading »

A few quotations from Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter’s Nation of Rebels , which are all the more revealing because they come from men decidedly on the left of the spectrum (though, in their terminology, they belong not to the “ameliorative” rather than the utopian . . . . Continue Reading »

Marcus Rench of Cary, North Carolina, sent along the following quotations from H. E. Jacob’s Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity . Note that all these quotations are about coffee , not today’s expensive imitations - which will remain unmentioned - that allow people who dislike coffee to . . . . Continue Reading »

Jules Michelet said: “Coffee, the sober drink, the mighty nourishment of the brain, which unlike other spirits, heightens purity and lucidity; coffee, which clears the clouds of the imagination and their gloomy weight; which illuminates the reality of things suddenly with the flash of . . . . Continue Reading »

Some notes for a disputatio talk on church unity. Thanks to Rusty Reno for clarification at several points. It is evident in the text, and it is evident in church history, that there is good and bad union and good and bad division. 1-2 Kings explores the first of these in particular, showing us . . . . Continue Reading »