Peter J. Leithart

I was honored to serve as guest editor of the Fall 2012 edition of Comment magazine, a publication of the Canadian think tank Cardus. The issue focuses on the “Word of God in the City of Man,” and includes articles by James Payton, Al Wolters, Richard Mouw, Marilynne Robinson, Daniel . . . . Continue Reading »

Next door on the main First Things site ( www.firstthings.com ), I summarize some recent revisionist scholarship on the origins of Islam. . . . . Continue Reading »

Near the bottom of the pit of hell, Dante encounters a man walking with his torso split from chin to groin, his guts and other organs spilling out. “See how I tear myself!” the man shrieks. “See how Mahomet is deformed and torn!” For us, the scene is not only gruesome but surprising, for Dante is not in a circle of false religion but in a circle reserved for those who tear the body of Christ. Like many medieval Christians, Dante views Islam less as a rival religion than as a schismatic form of Christianity… . Continue Reading »

There aren’t many contemporary Reformed theologians whose writings I find more stimulating and insightful than Peter Leithart and Jim Jordan. On everything from biblical commentary to historical theology, from poetry to politics, from music and liturgics to eschatology and hermeneutics, the . . . . Continue Reading »

The December 20 edition of the NYRB has some arresting photos of bronze statues in a London Royal Academy exhibit, made all the more impressive by the reviewer Andrew Butterfield’s description of the process of bronze sculpture: “Bronze is very different from most materials of . . . . Continue Reading »

Poor Camille Paglia. She’s worked herself into a froth. Writing in The Hollywood Reporter , she complains s(n)eeringly that the latest crop of women stars have betrayed feminism. With Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, and their crowd of new power women, we’re back “to the demure . . . . Continue Reading »

“None of our Western [economic] distinctions was completely absent in antiquity,” writes Sitta van Reden near the end of her Exchange in Ancient Greece (218). Yet, because of a different configuration of society the distinctions we take for granted were not so ingrained: “Rigid . . . . Continue Reading »

Morwenna Ludlow ( Gregory of Nyssa, Ancient and (Post)modern , 41-2) has some critical things to say about Robert Jenson’s use of Gregory of Nyssa, but she thinks he gets some things right: “Jenson is notable among systematic theologians in distinguishing clearly between the persons (or . . . . Continue Reading »

For I will consider my cat Alice. (Not my cat; my daughter’s, though I pay her keep.) Alice is a servant of the living God duly and daily serving him. Mostly she serves by pouncing on my bed at the first glance of the glory of God in the East, wreaths her body with elegant quickness until she . . . . Continue Reading »

God is the Father of precipitation, Job says (Job 38:25-30). Rain is filial, the Father’s nourishing gift to the world. The same imagery appears elsewhere. The righteous king is “like rain upon the mown grass” (Psalm 72:6), and the king’s “favor is like a cloud with . . . . Continue Reading »