Peter J. Leithart

I’ve asked myself that question a lot over the last few years, what with the spate of books and films featuring zombies. Terrence Rafferty asks the same question in a recent NYT piece. He points out that the insatiable, relentless zombies of today are relatively new: “The title creature . . . . Continue Reading »

Ryan Lizza writes an expose of Michelle Bachmann in The New Yorker . As Joe Carter shows on firstthings.com, the story is full of distortions and misleading claims. Doesn’t stop other journalists. The Economist summarizes Lizza’s piece as is, and so the ball starts rolling. . . . . Continue Reading »

Bavinck has these wise words about God’s will: “We can make as many distinctions in the will of God (as it relates to his creatures) as there are creatures; the free will of God is as richly variegated as that whole world is. Most important is the fact that God is father to all his . . . . Continue Reading »

In a 2004 article in Victorian Studies , Bernard Porter challenges today’s “cultural imperialist” assumption that the British empire pervaded Victorian life. Not so, he argues, for several reasons. One was that there was no single Britain: “this idea that there was only one . . . . Continue Reading »

Jim Rogers of Texas A&M disputes the analysis of the decline of the value of the dollar that I posted from the Economist a week or two ago. The remainder of this is from Jim: The Economist is a good magazine with very broad coverage hard to find in U.S. magazines. Its one error is to sound more . . . . Continue Reading »

Song of Songs 8:6-7: Put me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm. For love is as strong as death, jealousy is as severe as Sheol; its flashes are flashes of fire, the very flame of the LORD. Many waters cannot quench love, nor will rivers overflow it; if a man were to give all the . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Corinthians 10:16-17: The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ? For we, though many, are one bread and one body; for we all partake of that one bread. For centuries in the Western . . . . Continue Reading »

Idols look like living beings, but, as the Psalms point out, they cannot do anything with the equipment they have. They cannot see and judge, cannot hear and act, cannot smell the soothing aroma of sacrifice, cannot stretch out a hand against Egypt, cannot walk alongside Israel through the . . . . Continue Reading »

Is an adulterous one-night stand the same action as a night of marital love with one’s wife? If we say Yes, what have we assumed? We have assumed that the determinative dimensions of actions are the physical actions of sex. To an outsider who didn’t know that one woman is a mistress and . . . . Continue Reading »

In the preface to his controversial Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985, Volume 1) , Martin Bernal describes how he moved from Chinese studies, through study of Indo-China to a study of Judaism and Hebrew and finally to . . . . Continue Reading »