In his Discourses on Livy , Machiavelli pointed to the place of sacrifice in the establishment of Roman order. Sheehan ( Representations , 2009) summarizes the argument: “The Samnites knew that ‘it was necessary to induce obstinacy in the spirits of the soldiers, and that to induce it . . . . Continue Reading »
In a 2009 article on “sacrifice before the secular” in Representations , Jonathan Sheehan summarizes Wellhausen’s account of the history of sacrifice. In its original forms, sacrifice was both spiritual and secular, a seamless union of “spiritual solemnity and secular . . . . Continue Reading »
Pat Rogers reviews what sounds like a fascinating new study, Wolfram Schmidgen’s Exquisite Mixture: The Virtues of Impurity in Early Modern England . In Schmidgen’s view “mixture is at the heart of everything, a constitutive part of meaning in all cultural activity. Far from . . . . Continue Reading »
In the 2006 article in Past & Present I cited yesterday, Jonathan Sheehan traces the development of the “criterion of interiority” as a standard for judging true religion from false. One of the crucial developments were arguments like those of John Spencer’s 1685 On the Ritual . . . . Continue Reading »
In a 2006 article in Past & Present , Jonathan Sheehan examines controversies over idolatry in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Hobbes plays a crucial role in, as Sheehan thinks, radicalizing Calvin’s notion that the human mind is a “manufactory” of idolatry. Following . . . . Continue Reading »
“Ambition” doesn’t appear in the Geneva Bible, but by William Casey King’s count ( Ambition, A History: From Vice to Virtue ) it appears seventy-six times in the notes to that Bible. Almost all of the references are negative. In his NYRB review of King’s book, David . . . . Continue Reading »
In Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956 , Anne Applebaum highlights how the Soviets focused their efforts in Eastern Europe on crushing civil society, more than on crushing capitalism. As TNR reviewer Christopher Caldwell summarizes, “Applebaum credits the historian Stuart . . . . Continue Reading »
Powell ( The Moral Tradition of American Constitutionalism: A Theological Interpretation ) argues that the American system is largely a product of Enlightenment liberalism, embodying many of the features of the ideal Enlightened polities constructed by Locke, Montesquieu and others. He recognizes . . . . Continue Reading »
In The Moral Tradition of American Constitutionalism: A Theological Interpretation , Duke Law’s H. Jefferson Powell describes the contribution that common law made to the American legal tradition, highlighting the fact that common law represented a tradition of legal story-telling into which . . . . Continue Reading »
Jonathan Edwards considered the wheels of Ezekiel’s vision of the chariot to be a type of the history of the world: “The whole universe is a machine which god hath made for his own use, to be his chariot for him to ride in; as is represented in Ezekiel’s vision. In this chariot . . . . Continue Reading »
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