Peter J. Leithart

I watched October Baby in the theater recently. Inspired by the dramatic life of anti-abortion activist Gianna Jessen, the film tells the story of Hannah (Rachel Hendrix), who learns in early adulthood that she was adopted after a failed abortion. She embarks on a journey to find herself by finding her mother and by learning more about the circumstances of her birth. I wholly endorse the pro-life message of the movie, which comes across with such utter clarity that I have heard of viewers changing their position on abortion after the film… . Continue Reading »

In his classic study of Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church (Stories of Faith & Fame) , p. 418 , W. H. C. Frend concludes that “The ultimate legacy of the persecutions was the lasting division of Christendom into its eastern and western parts.” In the east, a “more . . . . Continue Reading »

Martyrs are almost by definition in positions of weakness. But the early accounts of Christian martyrs show that martyrdom tended to overturn the balance of power. Two examples from Eusebius illustrate the point. One story begins with a domestic conflict. A Christian wife married to a philandering . . . . Continue Reading »

Intellectually and politically, Christianity is a stability. We have a foundation. But Christianity also has a high tolerance for instability, uncertainty, imperfection, incompletion. The reason is that our foundation is that our foundation is not below us, set in the past; rather, our foundation . . . . Continue Reading »

Steven Crowell ( A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism (Blackwell Companions to Philosophy) ) gives this helpful explanation of what Husserl means when he says, counter-intuitively, that objects are “constituted” by the mind: “he means neither that the mind composes a . . . . Continue Reading »

Why, Leszel Kolakowski ( Husserl Search For Certitude ) wants to know, do philosophers talke about “Ego” when they mean the person, the self, or the soul? He thinks it’s a trick of language: You can’t say that the Ego is the philosopher, a real “I,” since for . . . . Continue Reading »

In his contribution to A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism (Blackwell Companions to Philosophy) , Steven Crowell summarizes the aims of phenomonology: it is “descriptive” rather than “constructive”; it aims at “clarification, not explanation”; it is . . . . Continue Reading »

In his German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781-1801 (p. 138-9), Frederick Beiser offers this lucid explanation of “the transcendental” in Kant: “Rather than reducing experience down to the level of individual consciousness, the critical philosophy makes both the . . . . Continue Reading »

According to Dermot Moran’s account ( Introduction to Phenomenology ), Husserl’s phenomenology was an effort to arrest “cultural fragmentation and relativism, brought about by deep uncertainties about the nature and project of reason in the twentieth century. Husserl saw himself . . . . Continue Reading »

Gadamer waxing (Hegelian and) perichoretic (quoted in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method , p. 159): “Life is defined by the fact that what is alive differentiates itself from the world in which in which it lives and to which it is bound, and preserves itself in such . . . . Continue Reading »