Peter J. Leithart

In his The Historical Road of Eastern Orthodoxy , Schmemann notes the importance of the anomaly of Constantine’s unbaptized condition. In Byzantine liturgical tradition, the conversion of Constantine is compared to that of Paul - both encountered Christ directly, without mediation of the . . . . Continue Reading »

Schmemann ( Church, World, Mission: Reflections on Orthodoxy and the West ) admits that in the east the church “surrendered” its “juridical” and “administrative” independence to the empire. But he claims that this is not a betrayal of the church’s true . . . . Continue Reading »

Pugnare mihi non licet , St Martin is supposed to have said. Not everyone buys is. J. Fontaine, who edited the text of the life of Martin, says that such a declaration in Martin’s time is unbelievable: “an aggressive proclamation of conscientious objection, forty-two years after the . . . . Continue Reading »

John Paul II wrote, “Today, as yesterday, musicians, composers, liturgical chapel cantors, church organists and instrumentalists must feel the necessity of serious and rigorous professional training. They should be especially conscious of the fact that each of their creations or . . . . Continue Reading »

Page again: “For those who oped to rise in the flesh for the Millennium and then the general judgement, ritual singing was a way to celebrate the continuity of bodily existence on both sides of the grade. The voice was one of the higher faculties of the body that Tertullian and others . . . . Continue Reading »

Page again: “The musical stave was a Latin-Christian invention and was confined, for many centuries, to the Occidental lands where Latin was the exclusive language of liturgical singing. It provided the means for an aggressively expansionist civilization to train singers relatively quickly so . . . . Continue Reading »

Christopher Page observes ( The Christian West and Its Singers: The First Thousand Years ) that the European-wide diffusion of plainsong created created for monks and clergy “a means to record contingent events so that they would be perceived, wherever the account was read, not just in terms . . . . Continue Reading »

A TLS reviewer says this about musical meaning: “The meaning of music is inexpressible because excessive, and it is excessive because music, like the world at large, eloquently affirms that it is, beyond any question of meaning.” And add, “By becoming descriptive, music seems to . . . . Continue Reading »

Exodus 20:8: Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. We live in a world of total labor. All time and space is valued by its use, its productivity, its function. There is no place that, in principle, withdrawn from productive use. There is no time “set aside from working hours and days, . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Corinthians 3:9-10a: We are god’s fellow workers; you are God’s field, God’s building. According to the grace of God which was given to me, as a wise master builder I laid a foundation, and another is building on it. Paul sees himself as a builder of God’s house, equipped . . . . Continue Reading »