Peter J. Leithart

In his invigorating The Great Dance , C. Baxter Kruger asks which Adam we think is greater: “If the human race fell in a mere man named Adam, what happened to the human race in the death, resurrection and ascension of the incarnate Son of God? Why is it that the Church has been so quick to . . . . Continue Reading »

Gracia’s entry is very good - a clearly written, thorough, stimulating summary of philosophical and literary debates about the meaning of meaning. He ends with the claim that theology “establishes not only textual meaning, but also the degree to which other factors play roles in the . . . . Continue Reading »

Gracia ultimately argues for a “cultural function” view of meaning. Cultural function goes beyond other factors that play a role in determining meaning “in that it establishes which of those factors take precedence over the others, and whether they are given any role in the . . . . Continue Reading »

Gracia’s own suggestion is that we can make sense of the determinateness and indeterminateness of meaning by distinguishing between “essential” and “accidental” meanings: “although texts may have a well-delimited core of meaning (an essential meaning), they may . . . . Continue Reading »

In the entry on meaning in the Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible (Baker), Jorge Gracia responds to the view that textual meaning has no limits with this: It is true that “texts are understood by different persons, or even by the same person at different times, to mean . . . . Continue Reading »

Joel Garver writes, in response to several posts from Raymond Tallis’s Not Saussure : “Most post-structuralist authors I’ve read aren’t dealing with things such as cups or trees or rocks, but rather things such as rationality, madness, criminality, virtue, etc. Foucault, for . . . . Continue Reading »

Fisch yet again: After reviewing the influence of the Old Testament, especially the Psalms, on prose writing in the seventeenth century, he adds: “it is worth bearing in mind that this is not only a matter of the seventeenth century. It is found earlier in the antiphonal plain-song of the . . . . Continue Reading »

Fisch again: Hebraic prose is different from the grand style of the sixteenth century, and different too from the pared-down plain style shared by many Puritans and all Baconians. It is a rhetoric, not an anti-rhetoric, but it is a rhetoric purified by Puritanism, Senecanism, and scientism. It is . . . . Continue Reading »

In his 1964 book, Jerusalem and Albion: The Hebraic Factor in Seventeenth-Century Literature , Harold Fisch argues that Blake provides a more insightful and broader account of the seventeenth century’s “dissociation of sensibility” than Eliot, who coined the phrase. For Blake, the . . . . Continue Reading »

William Deresiewicz has an excellent review of a new biography of Joseph Conrad in the June 11 issue of TNR . One thread of the review has to do with Conrad’s phantasmagorical vision of European imperialism and his related concern for the moral dangers of isolation from well-known social . . . . Continue Reading »