Peter J. Leithart

Kahn again: “We simultaneously affirm an international legal order of human rights; a global order of sovereign states; and a single market that knows no geographic bounds. These are the perspectives of reason, will, and desire. Each can make a global claim, geographically and conceptually. . . . . Continue Reading »

Paul Kahn ( Putting Liberalism in Its Place ) traces the dominance of economic/market logic in modern politics to questions about the “faculties of the soul.” On the economic model of these faculties, he argues, interest is “modeled on bodily desire.” This does not mean that . . . . Continue Reading »

Jesus says, “I am the arche and telos ” (Revelation 21:6). “Beginning and end” is too colorless, too geometric. Jesus is not the two points at either end of a line segment. Better to render this more “dynamically” and “organically” (forgive the hurrah . . . . Continue Reading »

Like his earlier book on Revelation, Wes Howard-Brook’s “Come Out My People!”: God’s Call Out of Empire in the Bible and Beyond has its goofy moments, as when he claims that Jesus completely rejected “imperial economics,” by which he means the money economy that . . . . Continue Reading »

Some aspects of Wes Howard-Brook and Anthony Gwyther’s Unveiling Empire: Reading Revelation Then and Now (Bible & Liberation) are silly, but there is a lot of very helpful material on the book of Revelation. For instance, the authors point out that there are seven worship scenes in the . . . . Continue Reading »

Drawing on the work of James Scott, Richard Horsley ( Jesus in Context: Power, People, and Perfomance ) offers this remarkable description of first-century temple worship: “The ideology of the Temple and high priesthood, both being institutions of venerable antiquity, aimed to symbolize that . . . . Continue Reading »

Wise words from NT Wright, in his contribution to Horsley’s Paul and Politics: Ekklesia, Israel, Imperium, Interpretation : “It is . . . much easier to highlight Paul’s confrontation with some aspect of his world when the aspect in question is one that is currently so deeply out . . . . Continue Reading »

What motivated the Jewish persecution of Christians? Paul Fredriksen ( From Jesus to Christ: The Origins of the New Testament Images of Christ ) suggests this plausible explanation: “News of an impending Messsianic kingdom, originating from Palestine, might trickle out via the . . . . Continue Reading »

A reader, Mark Kelly, sends along these reflections on the question I raised in a recent First Things column. The remainder of this post is from Kelly: “If you ask any modern to visualise the earth, or draw the earth, you will without exception evoke an exterior view of our planet, outside it . . . . Continue Reading »

Peter James and his colleagues dispute the existence of a three-century dark age in ancient history. They find it implausible to think that civilization died in the 12th or 11th century, and then revived, almost intact, three centuries later. Language provides one example of the difficulties of . . . . Continue Reading »