Peter J. Leithart

John Nugent’s The Politics of Yahweh: John Howard Yoder, the Old Testament, and the People of God [Theopolitical Visions series] is an important contribution to the study of Yoder’s work, as well as a provocative survey of the political development of Israel in the Old Testament. . . . . Continue Reading »

A recent New Yorker piece argues that big business remains the driver of economic growth: “the truth is that, from the perspective of the economy as a whole, small companies are not the real drivers of growth. One can see this by looking at the track record of the world’s economies. The . . . . Continue Reading »

Twice in the opening question of the Summa , Thomas justifies some institution or practice in the church with a reference to the need for saving truth to be communicated to the uneducated many. Are sacred doctrine, and revelation, necessary? Yes, and partly because “the truth of God such as . . . . Continue Reading »

I offer some reflections on contemporary worship music at http://www.firstthings.com/ this morning. As noted there, I owe most of my ideas to Ken Myers. . . . . Continue Reading »

“By the twelfth century,” Christopher Page writes in his magisterial The Christian West and Its Singers (2010), “the Latin West could be imagined as a soundscape of Latin chant.” From the eighth-century alliance of Pope Stephen with the Frankish King Pippin, a Frankish-Roman “repertory of plainsong” spread throughout Europe, suppressing competitors. By the end of the first millennium, cathedral singers in Hungary knew the same liturgy and sang the same chants for the same days as monastic singers in Spain and Sweden. … Continue Reading »

In a response to Biggar in another issue of Studies in Christian Ethics , Hays claims that “Jesus never told stories in which the good guys kill the bad guys.” Really? What will the owner of the vineyard do to the vine-growers, Jesus asks, and they say, “He will bring those . . . . Continue Reading »

Biggar again, defending the Augustinian view that killing in some circumstances is not a violation of love of neighbor: “I may (intend to) kill an aggressor, not because I hate him, nor because I reckon his life worth less than anyone else’s, but because, tragically, I know of no other . . . . Continue Reading »

In a 2009 article responding to Richard Hays’s pacifist reading of the New Testament ( Studies in Christian Ethics ), Nigel Biggar argues that Hays’s Anabaptist reading of Romans 13 is “incoherent.” Hays argues that while the use of force in punishment is ordained of God, . . . . Continue Reading »

Father George Zabelka was chaplain to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki squadrons that dropped the bomb, and administered the Eucharist to the Catholic pilot of dropped it. He later renounced his actions: “To fail to speak to the utter moral corruption of the mass destruction of civilians was to . . . . Continue Reading »

Make allowances for Schmemann’s settled anti-Western bias, but there is still a lot to be said for his account of the rise of secularism in the West. Its roots lie in the abandonment of the eschatological character of early Christianity: “It replaced the tension, essential in the early . . . . Continue Reading »