Peter J. Leithart

Wells again, commenting on the wedding at Cana: “This is not a story of the transformation of poison into safe water. It is not a story of a world deformed by sin being converted into a clean and healthy community. It is not a story of the obliteration or extermination of evil by a divine . . . . Continue Reading »

Another quotation from Wells, summing up the thesis of his book: “God has given his people everything they need to worship him, to be his friends, and to eat with him. He has done this by giving them the body of Christ. He gives his people the body of Christ in three forms – Jesus, the . . . . Continue Reading »

In his God’s Companions: Reimagining Christian Ethics (Challenges in Contemporary Theology) , Samuel Wells challenges the assumption of scarcity that he takes to be “a consistent majority strand in Christian ethics . . . that ethics the very difficult enterprise of making bricks from . . . . Continue Reading »

Expounding on the differences between explanation and narration, Craig Hovey ( To Share in the Body: A Theology of Martyrdom for Today’s Church ) connects them to two forms of witness: “If the eyewitness knows about the particular case and the character witness knows about the person, . . . . Continue Reading »

David Luy has a helpful article in the April 2011 issue of the International Journal of Systematic Theology , where he summarizes how von Balthasar harmonizes his Trinitarian theology with his claim that Christ, especially in the cross, is the “form” of God’s glory and beauty. he . . . . Continue Reading »

Martin Peretz, never one to mince words, has some harsh ones for Obama regarding his comments to Medvedev: ” the message, the important one, concerns us, here in America. It is that the American people can’t be trusted if the president is honest with them about what he proposes. More . . . . Continue Reading »

In his highly readable The Sublime (The New Critical Idiom) , Philip Shaw lucidly summarizes the standard distinction between the sublime and the beautiful: “The sublime is greater than the beautiful; the sublime is dark, profound, and overwhelming and implicitly masculine, whereas the . . . . Continue Reading »

Seerveld argues that “Christians in the twentieth century who adopt Beauty in some transcendental way as the key to understand art and human aesthetic activity are easily misled into also adopting the apologetic attitude toward art and the ontological framework in which Beauty was . . . . Continue Reading »

Calvin Seerveld ( Rainbows for the Fallen World: Aesthetic Life and Artistic Task ) points to the 18th-century introduction of “sublime” as the beginning of the end of aesthetics focused on beauty: “When ‘the sublime’ became understood around the middle of the . . . . Continue Reading »

Kuyper endorses poiesis , then waxes quasi-Platonic: “You are familiar with the question, already mentioned, whether art should imitate nature or should transcend it. In Greece grapes were painted with such accuracy that birds were deceived by their appearance and tried to eat them. And this . . . . Continue Reading »