Peter J. Leithart

“What are you doing here? What do you want?” Sarah Cassidy (Neve Campbell) asks Alex (William H. Macy), conscience-stricken scion of a family of contract killers, in 2000 film Panic .”You,” Alex answers. “Then what?” Sarah asks. It’s a great question. And . . . . Continue Reading »

Sayyid Qutb became something of a household name when he was identified as the intellectual inspiration behind al Qaeda. James Toth’s Sayyid Qutb: The Life and Legacy of a Radical Islamic Intellectual gives a portrait of the man and his thought. In his TLS review of Toth, Robert Irwin notes . . . . Continue Reading »

Randy Schekman won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine this year, but, according to the Economist , he used the moment in the spotlight “to announce that the laboratory he runs at the University of California, Berkeley, will boycott what he describes as ‘luxury . . . . Continue Reading »

Wright ( Paul and the Faithfulness of God ) doesn’t think Paul addresses ordo salutis questions directly, but he still attempts to tease out what Paul might have said on the subject: “First, the spirit works through the proclamation of the gospel. This powerful work of the spirit upon . . . . Continue Reading »

James Hamilton answers in his terrific What Is Biblical Theology?: A Guide to the Bible’s Story, Symbolism, and Patterns : Biblical theology is “the interpretive perspective of the biblical writers (15). This includes the way later writers interpret and reapply earlier Scriptures, the . . . . Continue Reading »

Phones depend on locatability. Adam Fisher reports in the NYT that Google’s next step is to make everything locatble: “All of our stuff will know where it is and that awareness will imbue the real world with some of the power of the virtual. Your house keys will tell you that theyre . . . . Continue Reading »

Lufsig, a toothy stuffed wolf dressed like a lumberjack who holds a miniature distressed grandma in one arm, is selling out from Hong Kong to Sweden. The toy became a symbol of anti-government protest last weekend when someone threw one of them at CY Leung, Hong Kong’s chief executive. . . . . Continue Reading »

Can “an over-concentration on the ‘objectivity’ of baptism . . . lead to a . . . casual or careless approach to actual Christian obligations”? Wright says so ( Paul and the Faithfulness of God , 963). But that assumes that what baptism “objectively” says and does . . . . Continue Reading »

Newt sees what Ryan is doing with his budget deal: Taking the budget and government shutdown out of the discussion for the mid-term elections, increasing the likelihood of a GOP takeover of the Senate. A savvy move. Then Ryan becomes the object of Tea Party attack. Perhaps that was part of the . . . . Continue Reading »

Discussing the filioque, Coakley ( God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay ‘On the Trinity’ , 332-3) argues that the only Sonship in the Trinity is the one “sourced” by the Father in the Spirit . This formulation reinforces the mutually constituting character of the Persons: . . . . Continue Reading »