Peter J. Leithart

The play begins and ends in the romantic world of magical, musical, moonlit Belmont, and in between descends into the gritty business of Venice. From the start, though, romantic and commercial concerns are linked. Continue Reading »

A social conservative he ain’t, but that doesn’t mean the Trump bomb is meaningless for social conservatives. Pope Francis isn’t the only one to observe that a nation that produces a spectacle like this can’t be healthy. With so much shrapnel flying, with so many settled conclusions being questioned, Christians have a rare opportunity to take stock and ask some basic questions about our polity. Continue Reading »

What should a preacher do in his Sunday sermon? Lecture on the Bible? Talk about Jesus? Tell stories? Comment on current events? Exhort Christians to live Christianly? Continue Reading »

The next president will have troops of civil rights attorneys poised to enlighten the ignorant masses and to punish states and school districts for treating boys as boys and girls as girls. Continue Reading »

Jesus taught his disciples everything concerning himself in all the Scriptures, and the greatest value of Leviticus is its unveiling of Christ. Continue Reading »

It is hard to mourn together while we have different understandings of death and the sacred. Continue Reading »

Ben Lerner’s elegant, amusing essay turns on a distinction between Poetry and poems. Poetry is Caedmon’s dream, a virtual ideal that actual poems can’t live up to. “The fatal problem with poetry,” Lerner writes, is “poems.” Every poet is, inevitably, “a tragic figure.” Continue Reading »

I tell friends: Nobody with a riding lawnmower needs to be justified. My 42-inch Sears Craftsman gives me all the salvation I can handle. Continue Reading »

Readers often find the opening chapters of 1 Chronicles stultifying. These pages contain list after list of names, with occasional mini-biographies thrown in to break up the monotony. Chronicles is hardly the first place we turn to for deep insight into human nature. Yet the fact that Chronicles . . . . Continue Reading »

Epistemology and ritual are rarely considered together. They are often opposed (“mindless ritual”), and ritual is more often associated with belief than with knowledge. At best, ritual is understood as an expression of knowledge that has been arrived at by other means. Dru Johnson doesn’t think these positions do justice to either ritual or epistemology. . . . Continue Reading »