Peter J. Leithart is President of the Theopolis Institute, Birmingham, Alabama, and an adjunct Senior Fellow at New St. Andrews College. He is author, most recently, of Gratitude: An Intellectual History (Baylor).
Vickers ( Invocation and Assent: The Making and the Remaking of Trinitarian Theology ) gives a thorough and challenging account of the collapse of Trinitarian theology in seventeenth-century English Protestantism. He thinks that the collapse can be traced to three roots: The appeal to Scripture as . . . . Continue Reading »
Building on the work of Robert Jenson and especially JND Kelly, Jason Vickers argues in Invocation and Assent: The Making and the Remaking of Trinitarian Theology that the proto-creedal affirmations of Trinitarian theology that are found in the various “rules of faith” specifically aim . . . . Continue Reading »
“Despite the contemporary belief that ‘the normal sacrificial cult is a cult without revelation or epiphany,’” writes Kimberley Patton in her Religion of the Gods: Ritual, Paradox, and Reflexivity , “primary evidence suggests that the Greeks believed that the gods both . . . . Continue Reading »
The cultural history of night is the subject of two recent books. Roger Ekirch’s At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past is a broad history of the uses and symbolism of night prior to the invention of electric lighting. One of his most fascinating discoveries was the habit of segmented . . . . Continue Reading »
Michio Kaku’s Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 is a breathless book. In the next hundred years, we’ll approach godlikeness and transcend human limits: “we will be able to manipulate objects with the power of our . . . . Continue Reading »
Exodus 33:13: Moses said, Consider too that this nation is Your people. When Israel breaks covenant by making and worshiping a golden calf, Yahweh is ready to start over. He warns Moses to stand aside, and at the same time promises to make Moses a new Abraham, the father of a new Israel (Exodus . . . . Continue Reading »
When Moses comes down from Sinai, he puts a veil over his shining face. The people couldn’t look at God’s glory, Paul tells us, because their hearts were hard. That was then. Paul himself is in a very different place. He speaks openly, without a veil. He doesn’t hide the glory of . . . . Continue Reading »
John Hendershot sends the following in response to my essay on gift and gratitude at firstthings.com today. The rest of this post is from Mr Hendershot. Your article this morning in First Things reminded me of an incident in my childhood. The culture of gift giving is not unknown in American . . . . Continue Reading »
Barth has been charged with modalism, partly because he chose to use the phrase “mode of existence” rather than the term “person” to describe the three in God. The charge doesn’t stick, mainly because Barth clearly understands what modalism is, and claims that it . . . . Continue Reading »
In The Gift, first published in the 1920s, the French ethnologist Marcel Mauss describes several Pacific Rim “gift economies.” Mauss argues that exchanges among these tribes are radically different from exchanges in money economies. In capitalism, trade is a utilitarian pursuit of self-interest; you don’t need to befriend the baker or butcher so long as he provides useful goods and services… . Continue Reading »
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