Peter J. Leithart

“For you first,” Peter tells the people at the portico of Solomon, “God raised His paida and sent Him to bless you by turning every one from your wicked ways” (Acts 3:26).This “raising up” (anistemi) might be a reference to the incarnation: the Father raised Jesus . . . . Continue Reading »

The songs of praise in the heavenly temple are tradically structured (Revelation 4). The first (Revelation 4:8) is the most obvious; it is a triad of traids. A triple sanctus, followed by a triple name of God (kurios, theos, pantokrator), followed by the name of God in three tenses (was, is, . . . . Continue Reading »

The living creatures in heaven give glory, honor and thanks to the Enthroned One (Revelation 4:9). But when the elders sing, they don’t offer “thanks,” but praise the worthiness of God to receive “glory, honor, and power” (4:11).This isn’t glory, honor, and power . . . . Continue Reading »

Click here for a lecture I gave on Dostoevsky a few weeks ago in Colorado Springs. The event was co-sponsored by the Anselm Society and the John Jay . . . . Continue Reading »

Conservatives often point to the 60s as the hinge point in the history of sexual morality. They mean the 1960s. As Faramerz Dabhoiwala shows in his Origins of Sex, the sexual revolution has much deeper roots, in the 1660s and 1760s as much as in the 1960s. Dabhoiwala places . . . . Continue Reading »

Christians and traditionalists often condemn homosexual activity as “unnatural” behavior. The apostle Paul uses precisely this term. What does it mean?If it is taken to mean that there is no homosexual behavior in the natural world, then the claim is manifestly untrue. As James Neill . . . . Continue Reading »

“Music,” writes Roger Scruton (Soul of the World, 175) “addresses us from beyond the borders of the natural world” and thus “requires us to respond to a subjectivity that lies beyond the world of objects, in a space of its own.” It’s one of the intimations . . . . Continue Reading »

At the heart of Scruton’s  Soul of the World is a plea for a “cognitive dualism” that he sets in opposition to all “nothing but” reductionisms - music is nothing but sounds, painting nothing but pigments on canvas, the world nothing but matter in motion, humans . . . . Continue Reading »

The sacred is Janus-faced, writes Roger Scruton in Soul of the World(15): “Sacred objects, words, animals, ceremonies, places all seem to stand at the horizon of our world, looking out to that which is not of this world, because it belongs in the sphere of the divine, and looking also . . . . Continue Reading »

Keith Darden writes in Foreign Affairsthat the main problem in Ukraine is not Russia but Ukraine.It’s dangerous to ignore the fact that Russia is exploiting divisions that have existed in Ukraine for a long time: “inattention to Ukraine’s internal demons reflects a dangerous . . . . Continue Reading »