Peter J. Leithart

Colossians 2:20-23: If you have died with Christ to the elementary principles of the world, why, as if you were living in the world, do you submit yourself to decrees, such as, Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch! (which all refer to things destined to perish with use) – . . . . Continue Reading »

For both parents and children, sexual purity is essential to Christian living and to Christian family life.  Paul tells the Thessalonians that God wants His people to be holy.  This means avoiding adultery, pornography, sodomy, pre-marital sex, lust and all other forms of sexual sin (1 . . . . Continue Reading »

In a provocative 2006 article in the Intercollegiate Studies Review , Remi Brague asks whether non-theocratic polities are possible.  If “theocracy” means “rule by clerics,” the answer is obviously Yes.  But Brague doesn’t think that’s the most helpful . . . . Continue Reading »

John R. Levison’s Filled with the Spirit challenges “two-tiered” readings of biblical pneumatology such as that found in Hermann Gunkel: “The activity of the Spirit is . . . not an intensifying of what is native to all.  It is rather the absolutely supernatural and . . . . Continue Reading »

So far as I know, Engels never rode the Underground, but he understood its spirit.  In The Condition of the Working Class in England , he wrote: “Hundreds of thousands of people from all classes and ranks of society crowd each other [on the streets] . . . . Meanwhile it occurs to no one . . . . Continue Reading »

According to an article by the nineteenth-century Slaophil philosopher Ivan Kireevsky, the classical world represented a “triumph of formal human reason” that determined the shape of Western Europe through the Middle Ages and into the modern period. In Western Christendom, “the . . . . Continue Reading »

Atheist philosophy Quentin Smith notes in a 2001 article that the theistic arguments of Plantinga, Wolterstorff, Alston, and others opened the door for God to return to philosophy.  Plantinga’s work in particular made it “apparent to the philosophical profession that realist . . . . Continue Reading »

What my sons do in their spare time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8JL7073_gk . . . . Continue Reading »

My colleague Jonathan McIntosh points to the Aristotelian source for Thomas’s views on touch: “we have a more precise sense of taste because it is a certain type of touch, and that is the most precise sense a human being has. For in the other sense, the human being is left behind by . . . . Continue Reading »

Knowing is like tasting and eating.  Where does that get us? If knowing is like eating, then we know things other by taking them into ourselves.  Knowing is a kind of participation, union, indwelling.  If knowing is seeing, we keep everything at a distance. If knowing is like eating, . . . . Continue Reading »