Peter J. Leithart

If “we have never been modern,” why do we all say we have? Why do we say we’re living in an iron cage, that the world has been secularized and disenchanted, that religion has passed its sell-by date? Perhaps we just like to beat ourselves up. Or, perhaps the notion of . . . . Continue Reading »

Horst Breuer writes in a 1976 articles from the Modern Language Review : “Strange as this may seem to readers unaccustomed to this kind of historical perspective, Macbeth’s murder is a historically progressive act, an emancipation from feudalism and Catholicism, a violent plunge into . . . . Continue Reading »

Vladimir Nabokov: “Some of my characters are, no doubt, pretty beastly, but I really don’t care, they are outside my inner self like the mournful monsters of a cathedral facade - demons placed there merely to show they have been booted out.” . . . . Continue Reading »

Chesterton again: “It is currently said that hope goes with youth, and lends to youth its wings of a butterfly; but I fancy that hope is the last gift given to man, and the only gift not given to youth. Youth is pre-eminently the period in which a man can be lyric, fanatical, poetic; but . . . . Continue Reading »

Chesterton on Dickens: “‘I am an affectionate father,’ [Dickens] says, ‘to every child of my fancy.’ He was not only an affectionate father, he was an ever-indulgent father. The children of his fancy are spoilt children. They shake the house like heavy and shouting . . . . Continue Reading »

In his inimitably paradoxical style, Chesterton notes that “One of the actual and certain consequences of the idea that all men are equal is immediately to produce very great men . . . . This has been hidden from us of late by a foolish worship of sinister and exceptional men, men without . . . . Continue Reading »

Robert Weldon Whalen, Sacred Spring: God and the Birth of Modernism in Fin de Siecle Vienna . Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007. Hardback, 339 pp. $25.00. Sacred Spring is part travelogue, part intellectual history, part art and music criticism. Whalen’s thesis is that Viennese modernism, the . . . . Continue Reading »

One Axel Schmidt has written a book entitled: Die Suche nach dem rechten Lebens-Mittel. Harry Potter als Beispiel einer modernen praeparatio Evangelii . “Harry Potter” is part of the subtitle, of course, the Harry Potter that, for Schmidt, is an “example of a modern preparation of . . . . Continue Reading »

Two notes about Babel: 1) What does it mean to construct a tower to heaven? Traditionally, this has been understood literally: They were trying to build a tower high enough to reach the sky. But were they really that naive? Surely they had climbed mountains and realized that the sky was much . . . . Continue Reading »

INTRODUCTION “Follow Me,” Jesus said as the new Moses, leading a restored Israel out of the old Egypt-Israel that was under the reign of Death. How do we follow Him? That’s what the Sermon on the Mount is all about. THE TEXT “And seeing the multitudes, He went up on a . . . . Continue Reading »