Peter J. Leithart

Jenson ( Systematic Theology: Volume 1: The Triune God , 47) notes that ancient gods were generally not jealous: “The gods in general have no final stake in their individual identities and will arrange them to suit our religious needs. Thus Greece knew Kourai, and Canaan knew Baalim, by the . . . . Continue Reading »

Jenson points out ( Systematic Theology: Volume 1: The Triune God , 25) that, though the church’s witness is carried on and received by institutions and traditions, “no structures of historical continuity merely as such can assure the integrity of witness to reality that is other than . . . . Continue Reading »

Henry Lefebvre ( Introduction to Modernity ) vividly captures the modernity of modernity, our continuous quest for novelty: “Once, in an ahistorical society with virtually no conscious history, nothing began and nothing came to an end. Today everything comes to an end virtually as soon as it . . . . Continue Reading »

Agamben cites Rudolf Sohm ( Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty , 9), who argued that “the primitive church [was] a charismatic community, within which no properly juridical organization was possible.” There was no “legal power to rule” but instead “the organization of . . . . Continue Reading »

Giorgio Agamben writes that Christianity produced a “new ontological-practical paradigm, namely that of effectiveness, in which being and acting enter into a threshold of undecidability. If, in the words of Foucault, Plato taught the politician not what he must do but what he must be in order . . . . Continue Reading »

F. P. Ramsey is hardly a household name, even among philosophers, not nearly so well-known as his brother, Michael, who became Archbishop of Canterbury. The TLS reviewer of Frank Ramsey (1903-1930): A Sister’s Memoir captures something of his astonishing brilliance: “In Cambridge in the . . . . Continue Reading »

Reviewing Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch in the New York Times Book Review , Stephen King - who knows about big books - reflects on the challenges of writing big novels: “Such a prodigious investment of time and talent indicates an equally prodigious amount of ambition, but surely there . . . . Continue Reading »

N.T. Wright’s long-awaited forthcoming Paul and the Faithfulness of God is full of juicy little polemics, few juicier than this one: “the scholarly construct of a ‘parousia’ in which the space-time universe would cease to exist, followed by the second-order construct of a . . . . Continue Reading »

Latour, speaking of the reductionisms of critical thought ( We Have Never Been Modern ): “The critics have developed three distinct approaches to talking about our world: naturalization, socialization and deconstruction. Let us use E.O. Wilson, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jacques Derrida — a . . . . Continue Reading »

Bruno Latour ( We Have Never Been Modern ) explains why there isn’t, or shouldn’t be, an anthropology of modernity: “In works produced by anthropologists abroad, you wil l not find a single trait that is not simultaneously real, social and narrated. If the analyst is subtle, she . . . . Continue Reading »