Peter J. Leithart

In a post several years ago ( http://www.leithart.com/archives/002185.php ) I summarized Foucault’s thoughts on the “architecture of control. It didn’t occur to me at the time that there are intriguing similarities between the process that Foucault describes and the organization . . . . Continue Reading »

The Canadian philosophy George Grant viewed Roe as “poison” to liberalism because of its “unthought ontology.” He elaborates: “In adjudicating for the right of the mother to choose whether another member of her species lives or dies, the judge is required to make an . . . . Continue Reading »

Joyce Kerr Tarpley’s Constancy and the Ethics of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park is not only an excellent study of Austen’s deepest and most important novel, but also a thorough vindication of the thesis that Austen was no mere spinner of fluffy romances but a thinker of the first . . . . Continue Reading »

Brad Green is a friend, but even if he weren’t, I would be recommending his freshly published The Gospel and the Mind: Recovering and Shaping the Intellectual Life . He keeps things focused on basics - creation and eschatology, the cross, the nature of language, and the nexus between ethics . . . . Continue Reading »

Matthew’s quotation of Isaiah 53:4 in 8:17 is not from the LXX. It is either Matthew’s own translation, or a quotation from another Greek translation that is no longer extant. Matthew’s quotation is closer to the Hebrew than the LXX, but according to Davies and Allison, Matthew . . . . Continue Reading »

Revelation 4:9-11: Whenever the living creatures give glory and honor and thanks to Him who sits on the throne, who lives forever and ever, the twenty-four elders fall down before Him who sits on the throne and worship Him who lives forever and ever, and cast their crowns before the throne, saying: . . . . Continue Reading »

This is the first Sunday after Epiphany, when we commemorate the appearance of God in His Son. It is a strange appearance. The Son appears in the flesh, lives, dies, rises, and then quickly disappears. Light flickers in darkness, but then the light goes out, goes elsewhere, and when then? Does . . . . Continue Reading »

The redoubtable Bruno Latour begins his Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies) with a statement of his thesis that “social” does not describe a substance or an “ingredient” that can serve as an explanation . . . . Continue Reading »

In his excellent Christian Ethics in a Technological Age , Brian Brock argues that despite modernity’s best efforts, “the Father of Jesus Christ has not allowed a secularizing West to succeed in erasing the heritage of centuries of divine judgment and reshaping of Western . . . . Continue Reading »

In an older article on purity in ancient Israel, Jacob Neusner makes the trenchant observation that purity concerns arise primarily within sectarian disputes among Jews: “When gen- tiles profane the Temple, the language of cultic purity is not apt to enter into the description of the event, . . . . Continue Reading »