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).
Tocqueville ( The Ancien Rgime and the French Revolution , 16) describes the “fury” of the philosophes attack on the church: “They attacked its clergy, its hierarchy, its institutions,and its dogma, and, the better to demolish all these things, they soughtto undermine the very . . . . Continue Reading »
Diderot explains the difference between a priest and a philosophe in his “Observations sur le Nakaz” ( Political Writings , 85): “The philosophe says much against the priest; the priest says muchagainst the philosophe . But the philosophe has never killed priests, andthe priest . . . . Continue Reading »
Diderot begins his entry on “Art” in the first volume of the Encyclopedia with a brief for artisans: “Let us at last give artisans their due. The liberal arts have spentenough time singing their own praises; they could now use what voicethey have left to celebrate the mechanical . . . . Continue Reading »
In an address on the tercentenary of the Augsburg Confession, Hegel celebrated the freedom that the Lutheran Reformation brought, a freedom that healed the schism that divided the soul and the split that harmed the commonwealth ( Political Writings , 191). To highlight this liberation, he . . . . Continue Reading »
Following Husserl, Roman Jakobson insisted that linguistic sounds cannot be separated from the meaning of words. In his essay on Russian Formalism in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 8: From Formalism to Poststructuralism (24-5), Peter Steiner explains: “Edmund . . . . Continue Reading »
Throughout the Old Testament, separation and division is a moment in an act of creation. Yahweh “divides” ( badal ) this and that five times in Genesis 1. He separates and sets apart Israel from the nations (1 Kings 8:53), Levites from the rest of Israel (Numbers 8:14; 16:9), priests . . . . Continue Reading »
Isaiah 59 opens with an arresting parallel line: A. Not shortened the hand of Yahweh B. from saving A’. And not heavy ( kavod ) his ear B’. from hearing. Several observations emerge from this structure. First, the connection of hand and ear is significant. Yahweh saves by His . . . . Continue Reading »
Menand and Rainey ( The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 7: Modernism and the New Criticism , 7-8) trace the influence of TS Eliot on the rise of New Criticism, ultimately of structuralism: “There was the inventive body of criticism that Eliot wrotebetween 1917 and 1924; the ways . . . . Continue Reading »
Following the theory of Peter Burger’s Theory Of The Avant-Garde, Menand and Rainey (Introduction to The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 7: Modernism and the New Criticism , 3-4) note that avant-gardism is (of course) an assault on bourgeois art, “an assaultaginst art as . . . . Continue Reading »
In their introduction to The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 7: Modernism and the New Criticism , Luis Menand and Lawrence Rainey comment on the increasing speed in the changeover of critical fashion fads: “as deconstructionis assimilated to various currents of feminist, . . . . Continue Reading »
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