Peter J. Leithart

In the December 2009 issue of Poetry , DH Tracy explores the difficulty that contemporary poets have in combining moral passion with aesthetic/sensual interest.  Quotations from poems by Frederick Seidel and Robert Hass lead to this observation: “sensuous experiences run up and down them . . . . Continue Reading »

Toward the end of The Star of Redemption (Modern Jewish Philosophy and Religion) , Rosenzweig finds the star in the human face: “The basic level is ordered according to the receptive  organs; they are the building blocks, as it were, which together compose the face, the mask, namely . . . . Continue Reading »

“Come let us reason together,” Isaiah says.  An exhortation to logical deduction with the help of syllogism? Certainly, logic and syllogisms are involved, but the verb “reason” ( yakach ) is commonly translated as “argue” (Job 13:15) or . . . . Continue Reading »

Is God more concerned with bodies or souls?  It’s an imperfect indicator, but a count of the use of terms in Scripture is revealing, perhaps even startling. The word “soul” is used in the NASB just under 300x (a few dozen more than the number of times that the NASB uses . . . . Continue Reading »

Robert Jenson writes, “We may note that Augustine’s teaching that the true members of the church are the predestined, who cannot now be enumerated, is the origin of the idea that the true church is ‘invisible,’ though this proposition itself should not be fathered on . . . . Continue Reading »

In his recent The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future , Robert Darnton suggests that the development of information technologies brings the Enlightenment aspiration to democratize learning closer to realization.  In his TNR review of Darnton’s book, Anthony Grafton quotes . . . . Continue Reading »

How do we know things?  Experimentation, deduction, observation? In Genesis, knowledge is first associated with two things - with food and with sex.  There is a tree of the knowledge of good and evil, whose fruit opens the eyes of Adam and Eve so that they perceive that they are naked. . . . . Continue Reading »

A Tale of Two Cities fits snugly into several contexts.  It is an historical novel about a major event of the (then) recent past.  Published in 1859, the seventieth anniversary of the beginning of the fall of the Bastille, it depicted an event that was still a touchstone of history and . . . . Continue Reading »

Is the US leadership of the “free world” in jeopardy?  Gideon Rachman ( Financial Times ) suggests that the deeper question is whether there is still a free world to be leader of.  That is, he points to evidence from Copenhagen and elsewhere that suggests that world . . . . Continue Reading »

John Paul II suggests that Adam’s wedding song, celebrating Eve as “flesh of flesh” and “bone of bone” should not be understood merely as a statement of derivation.  Even is “flesh of flesh” not merely because she was taken from flesh; the phrases are . . . . Continue Reading »