Peter J. Leithart

Timothy Snyder ponders the future of Ukraine . There aren’t many good results. The protests can’t force the issue, since there is no election on the horizon. An attempted no confidence vote has failed. It’s not clear that the police and military will be able to keep the protests . . . . Continue Reading »

Thomas Weinandy’s In the Likeness of Sinful Flesh: An Essay on the Humanity of Christ is a lucid, concise, yet comprehensive study of an issue that has become controversial. He states his thesis clearly at the outset: “While Christian theologians have stressed that the Son ofGod became . . . . Continue Reading »

In a discussion of theological paradox , John Frame comments on and approves a formula regularly used by Cornelius Van Til, “not in spite of, but because of.” Frame sees it as a summons to creative rethinking of a lot of classic “paradoxes”: “the formula ‘not in . . . . Continue Reading »

In his essay on “The Intertwining - The Chiasm,” published in The Visible and the Invisible , Merleau-Ponty argues that the correlation of proximity and distance in the act of perception shows that world is designed to be seen by bodies: “We understand then why we see the things . . . . Continue Reading »

Aidan Nichols’s Figuring out the Church: Her Marks, and Her Masters is a brief, clear, workmanlike introduction to ecclesiology. The book is divided into two parts, the first organized around the marks of the church (one, holy, catholic, apostolic) and the second expounding the ecclesiologies . . . . Continue Reading »

Musings on what Advent teaches us about the Trinity at the Trinity House site . . . . . Continue Reading »

Mark Valeri attends to minutiae as he examines the interaction between religion and commercial activity in early New England ( Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America ). He attends to “merchants accounts and ledgers, businesscorrespondence and personal letters, . . . . Continue Reading »

Christopher Schrock responds to my post on “materialist psychology” with this fascinating passage from A Puritan Theology: Doctrine for Life (209-10)by Joel Beeke and Mark Jones. They are summarizing Thomas Goodwin’s An Unregenerate Man’s Guiltiness : “Goodwin points . . . . Continue Reading »

Yahweh shows Abram the starry heavens and says “so shall your seed be.” Abram believes, and Yahweh counts it as righteousness (Genesis 15). When Paul quotes this in Galatians, he emphasizes the singleness of that Seed: The Seed is Christ.Paul claims that the seed promised to Abram is . . . . Continue Reading »

In an essay on university bureaucracy , Tim Parks quotes a length passage from Little Dorrit , where Dickens describes the work of the Office of Circumlocution: “The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government. No public . . . . Continue Reading »