Peter J. Leithart is President of the Theopolis Institute, Birmingham, Alabama, and an adjunct Senior Fellow at New St. Andrews College. He is author, most recently, of Gratitude: An Intellectual History (Baylor).
Everyone is talking about “apocalyptic” today. I join the chorus and reflect on CS Lewis’s The Great Divorceas an exercise in apocalyptic . . . . Continue Reading »
Rosenstock-Huessy points out in one of the letters collected in Judaism Despite Christianitythat Kant worked out his entire philosophy in conscious dialogue with Rousseau: “While he himself wants to stand metaphysics on its head, just as Kepler and Newton stood physics, yet he compares for his . . . . Continue Reading »
Rosenstock (Judaism Despite Christianity: The 1916 Wartime Correspondence Between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig, 127-8) objects to Rosenzweig’s characterization of church history as a move from the church of the spirit to the church of dogma and tradition. Rosenstock thinks the . . . . Continue Reading »
Rosenzweig locates a fundamental similarity between Judaism and Christianity in their mutual affirmation of protology and eschatology, which give form and meaning to the “middle things” that occur between A and B - that is, the middle things of world history. Rosenstock objects that the . . . . Continue Reading »
In one of his later essays, Jacques Derrida identified a “newly arisen apocalyptic tone in philosophy,” and in the decade since his death, that tone has become a tumult. René Girard’s latest is a shrill warning about the end of European civilization. Slavoj Zizek hears the hoofbeats of four horsemen: environmental destruction, biogenetics, imbalances in global capitalism, and “the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions” . . . Continue Reading »
Rosenzweig (Judaism Despite Christianity: The 1916 Wartime Correspondence Between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig, 157) offers this profound rejoinder to the professorial habit of trying to modify the traditional epochs of history:“It is necessary . . . to accept the traditional . . . . Continue Reading »
Rosenzweig (Judaism Despite Christianity: The 1916 Wartime Correspondence Between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig, 115) says that “Only what belongs to both man and woman belongs to all men, and everything else has only sectional interest.”Rosenstock agrees, and elaborates: . . . . Continue Reading »
In one of his wartime letters to Franz Rosenzweig (the correspondence published as Judaism Despite Christianity: The 1916 Wartime Correspondence Between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig), Rosenstock challenges the Rosenzweig’s idea that his love for a particular scholar can be a . . . . Continue Reading »
Rebecca Rosen reports at the Atlantic on a century-long error on the front page of the New York Times. The issue number for the February 6, 1898 edition was 14,499; the next day, the issue number was 15,000. Nobody noticed until 1999.At the beginning of 2000, the newspaper announced that Aaron . . . . Continue Reading »
In Desire, Dialectic, and Otherness: An Essay on Origins, recently reprinted by Wipf & Stock, William Desmond concedes that “the modern self has been excessively subjectivized” (45). But he thinks that, for all its faults, Cartesianism focused attention on an inescapable . . . . Continue Reading »
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