Peter J. Leithart

“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Advent isn’t supposed to soothe us. Continue Reading »

Is the gospel identical with the Protestant doctrine of salvation? Or is the gospel a message about God's Son that Protestants and Catholics affirm together? Continue Reading »

Complaints about aging contain an implicit affirmation of the body, rooted in the truth that our bodies are us. When our bodies ail, we ail; when they fail, we fail. We touch the world—lovers and enemies, soccer and sunsets, sonnets and sushi—only through eyes and ears and brains and nerves and hands and tongues. Continue Reading »

The play begins and ends in the romantic world of magical, musical, moonlit Belmont, and in between descends into the gritty business of Venice. From the start, though, romantic and commercial concerns are linked. Continue Reading »

A social conservative he ain’t, but that doesn’t mean the Trump bomb is meaningless for social conservatives. Pope Francis isn’t the only one to observe that a nation that produces a spectacle like this can’t be healthy. With so much shrapnel flying, with so many settled conclusions being questioned, Christians have a rare opportunity to take stock and ask some basic questions about our polity. Continue Reading »

What should a preacher do in his Sunday sermon? Lecture on the Bible? Talk about Jesus? Tell stories? Comment on current events? Exhort Christians to live Christianly? Continue Reading »

The next president will have troops of civil rights attorneys poised to enlighten the ignorant masses and to punish states and school districts for treating boys as boys and girls as girls. Continue Reading »

Jesus taught his disciples everything concerning himself in all the Scriptures, and the greatest value of Leviticus is its unveiling of Christ. Continue Reading »

It is hard to mourn together while we have different understandings of death and the sacred. Continue Reading »

Ben Lerner’s elegant, amusing essay turns on a distinction between Poetry and poems. Poetry is Caedmon’s dream, a virtual ideal that actual poems can’t live up to. “The fatal problem with poetry,” Lerner writes, is “poems.” Every poet is, inevitably, “a tragic figure.” Continue Reading »