Peter J. Leithart

From David Hawkes’s TLS review of Landon Storrs’s The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left , Storrs strikes a rare balance on the contested history of McCarthy and the HUAC. On the one hand, Storrs argues that the targets were often social democrats rather than . . . . Continue Reading »

Theories of the atonement are usually categorized as “objectivist” or “subjectivist.” Objective theories claim that the death of Jesus paid for sin and therefore reconciled God and man. Subjective theories claim that the real action of the atonement isn’t in the event . . . . Continue Reading »

Is the Servant of the Lord in Isaiah collective (Israel or a faithful remnant) or individual (a prophet or Messiah)? Commentators have chosen sides, but Hans-Judgen Hermisson (in The Suffering Servant: Isaiah 53 in Jewish and Christian Sources , 20) says that it’s a bad question. The point of . . . . Continue Reading »

Leviticus 5 prescribes a trespass offering for various sins in which a person violates God’s holy things or His holy name. But then there is also a requirement of a trespass offering when someone steals from a fellow Israelite. Many follow Jacob Milgrom in claiming that there is a violation . . . . Continue Reading »

Plato excludes poets, yet he is a poet. It’s an old problem. Schindler ( Plato’s Critique of Impure Reason: On Goodness and Truth in the Republic , 304ff) argues that it’s a mistake to see it as a contradiction. Rather, there is an ambivalence (two-sidedness) to Plato’s . . . . Continue Reading »

Analyzing Plato’s critique of poetry, Schindler ( Plato’s Critique of Impure Reason: On Goodness and Truth in the Republic , 295) notes that the critique in the last book of the Republic is “not in the first place a moral one . . . but primarily ontological.” Schindler . . . . Continue Reading »

Skepticism is, DC Schindler argues, self-refuting ( Plato’s Critique of Impure Reason: On Goodness and Truth in the Republic ). Pointing that out, though, doesn’t convince the skeptic, who is not so much a hater of reason but someone who “has simply grown numb to the claims of . . . . Continue Reading »

In his contribution to Perspectives on Purity and Purification in the Bible , Roy Gane examines the anomaly of the concluding purification rite performed by a Nazirite at the completion of his vow. Why would purification be needed? Some have suggested that the purification ( hatt’at ) . . . . Continue Reading »

According to D.C. Schindler’s account ( Plato’s Critique of Impure Reason: On Goodness and Truth in the Republic , 42-3), Plato is not an idealist searching for a “pure” starting point. On the contrary, he knows that the search for such a standpoint is chimerical. The . . . . Continue Reading »

Sheehan ends his Representations (2009) by noting the cost of privatizing sacrifice, and with it religion: “The modern ethic of sacrifice denuded of utility, unhinged from exchange and divorced from law, bears virtually no resemblance to its early modern incarnations. Now sacrifice stands . . . . Continue Reading »