Peter J. Leithart

It’s typical for Protestants to criticize Catholics for “objectifying” the sacraments and making them purely mechanical channels of grace, where faith is irrelevant. That’s a caricature of genuine Catholic teaching, but put that to the side. There’s a case to be made . . . . Continue Reading »

A remarkable statement from Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics on the necessary, incessant development of doctrine: “We need to overcome our astonishment over the fact that the New Testament nowhere explicitly mentions infant baptism . . . .The validity of infant baptism does not lapse on . . . . Continue Reading »

Tom Lodge’s Mandela: A Critical Life does a good job of explaining the mythical, iconic attraction that Mandela attained, and finds its roots in Mandela’s upbringing, his legal training, and the deliberate effort to present him as the face of a new Africa. Lodge writes, “Mandelas . . . . Continue Reading »

Sharing a meal seems like an egalitarian, democratic sacrament. Alice Julier thinks not, and argues in her Eating Together: Food, Friendship and Inequality that food practices have built-in hierarchies. In her TLS review of the book, Fran Bigman points out that “Although affluent hosts talk . . . . Continue Reading »

After his early death in 1960, J.L. Austin was nearly forgotten,. In recent years, there has been something of an Austin revival, as philosophers have given renewed attention to the issues of ordinary language and epistemology that Austin raised. Writing in the TLS , Duncan Pritchard notes that . . . . Continue Reading »

Virginia Postrel is the insightful author of a number of works of cultural analysis, including The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness and The FUTURE AND ITS ENEMIES: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress . . . . . Continue Reading »

Caroline Webber reviews Alisa Solomon’s Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof in the NYTBR . You thought it was just a musical? Think again. Solomon’s book “explores not only the making of the musical, but also the way the show reflects evolving Jewish . . . . Continue Reading »

Michel Delon’s recently translated The Libertine: The Art of Love in Eighteenth-Century France examines one of the main cultural values of eighteenth-century France. It documents, in the words of the NYTBR reviewer, “the dazzling breadth and depth of the 18th-century obsession with . . . . Continue Reading »

The intimate link between the eucharistic and ecclesial body of Christ was a commonplace of medieval theology, and continued into the early Reformation. Thomas Davis writes that “before the Protestant conflicts over the presence of Christ’s true body in the Eucharist came about, it was . . . . Continue Reading »

Stephen Strehle examines the differences between Luther and Zwingli on faith and righteousness in a 1992 article in the Sixteenth Century Journal . Faith in the accomplished work of Christ on the cross dominates Zwingli’s views, while Luther focuses on the Christ who died and rose again who . . . . Continue Reading »