Peter J. Leithart

In his Exhortation to Martyrdom ( Origen: An Exhortation to Martyrdom, Prayer, and Selected Works , p. 61 ), Origen ponders why Jesus would have resisted martyrdom by asking His Father to remove the cup from him. Origen quotes from the synoptics, each of which quotes Jesus praying for the removal . . . . Continue Reading »

Gadamer takes play and games as the starting point of his discussion of the ontology of art, and then asks what happens when we introduce an audience and make the game repeatable, when play becomes a play that can be played-for over and over again. Joel Weinsheimer ( Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: A . . . . Continue Reading »

Critiquing Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics, Gadamer ( Truth and Method (Continuum Impacts) , pp. 166-7) says that his effort to reconstruct the setting of the original work in order to divine the creative act of the creator is impossible: “We may ask whether what we obtain [from . . . . Continue Reading »

In his Between Earth and Heaven: Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and the Meaning of Christian Tragedy , Roger Cox analyzes the Aristotelian theory of tragedy and finds it, shall we say, wanting: “The Aristotelian doctrine of hamartia is completely misleading.” Cox doesn’t think it fits . . . . Continue Reading »

Gadamer: “Nothing is so strange, and at the same time so demanding, as the written word. Not even meeting speakers of a foreign language can be compared with this strangeness, since the language of gesture and of sound is always in part immediately intelligible. The written word and what . . . . Continue Reading »

Gadamer writes, “a picture is situated halfway between a sign and a symbol. Its representing is neither a pure pointing-to-something [sign] nor a pure taking-the-place-of-something [symbol]. It is this intermediate position that raises it to a unique ontological status. Artificial signs and . . . . Continue Reading »

Gadamer consistently speaks of works of art as “events of being.” Is this anything more than Heideggerian mumbo-jumbo? I think so. Gadamer appears to mean at least two things. First, with regard to the art work itself: The art work brings something into existence that wasn’t there . . . . Continue Reading »

Gadamer says in his discussion of the ontology of art in Truth and Method (Continuum Impacts) , “It is quite in order that the opposition between profane and sacred proves to be only relative. We need only recall the meaning and history of the word ‘profane’: the . . . . Continue Reading »

Every god claims in some fashion to be Alpha and Omega, the source of everything and the end toward which everything is moving, the deep past and the deep future. Only the Triune God can actually be Alpha and Omega. A monadic God can perhaps be Alpha (though I’m doubtful), the source. But he . . . . Continue Reading »

John 21:15: Jesus said to Peter, “Feed my lambs.” There are two charcoal fires in the last chapters of John’s gospel, and Peter is at both of them. He warms himself by the charcoal fire in the court of the high priest. There he denies Jesus, and when Jesus looks at him across the . . . . Continue Reading »