Peter J. Leithart

When abused, authority damages bodies. A husband punches his wife and breaks her nose. Abusive day care workers crush the bones, dislocate the limbs, and scar the souls of small children. Tyrants torture bodies into a quivering mess. Even when the results are not so extreme, abusive authority disables bodies. A husband who never lays an aggressive finger on his wife may still silence her with mockery and bullying threats. Children are blinded to reality by the manipulations of a sexual predator. Harsh teachers don’t open ears to instruction, but deafen… . Continue Reading »

It is common these days to read the Bible as an anti-imperial epic, the story of God and Israel, then (for Christians) God and Jesus, against empire. “Come out, come out from Babylon, my people!” is the theme. It’s a hard sell for all sorts of reasons. Jeremiah urges the people of Judah to enter not exit Babylon (Jeremiah 27, 29). Isaiah invests Cyrus the Persian conqueror with Davidic titles”he is the Lord’s “servant” and “shepherd” and “anointed one” (Isaiah 44-45)… . Continue Reading »

Medieval Christians were obsessed with the Song of Songs. No book of the Bible received such intensely devoted attention in commentary and preaching. Bernard of Clairvaux preached eighty-six homilies on the Song and died just as he was getting started on chapter 3. The Song has a much-diminished place in the modern Christian imagination. The time is far past to reverse that trend, but it is worth reversing only if the Song is recovered as allegory… . Continue Reading »

Some time ago, a friend remarked that it is scarcely possible to have a sensible discussion of empire these days. What follows is not that discussion, though I hope it is sensible. It is a set of truisms and assertions, some so obvious that it is telling that they have become controversial. My aim is to sketch the contours of a sensible discussion to come… . Continue Reading »

We will never know what happened between Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the maid in his hotel room. What, if anything, did Herman Cain say or do to the women who accused him of sexual harassment? What are Putin and Hu and Ahmadinejad planning? Until this week, how many knew the U.S. has drone bases in the Seychelles? … Continue Reading »

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God … And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” We miss the full force of John’s Advent announcement if we understand “flesh” as “body” or “human nature.” In the Bible, flesh names a particular quality of human life. It is Scripture’s global term for the physical and moral condition of postlapsarian existence… . Continue Reading »

“By the twelfth century,” Christopher Page writes in his magisterial The Christian West and Its Singers (2010), “the Latin West could be imagined as a soundscape of Latin chant.” From the eighth-century alliance of Pope Stephen with the Frankish King Pippin, a Frankish-Roman “repertory of plainsong” spread throughout Europe, suppressing competitors. By the end of the first millennium, cathedral singers in Hungary knew the same liturgy and sang the same chants for the same days as monastic singers in Spain and Sweden. … Continue Reading »

In the October 2011 issue of First Things, editor R. R. Reno ponders why it is so difficult for our culture “to identify a real difference between same-sex couples and heterosexual couples.” Relaxed sexual mores and the erosion of traditional male-female roles have destabilized marriage. So, Reno emphasized, has the decoupling of sex from fertility. It is especially here that an effective defense of marriage today requires not only political effort, but “a renewal of our moral and social imaginations.” … Continue Reading »

Derived from the Greeks, the contrast between the contemplative and active life early on became a Christian commonplace. It was systematized by Thomas Aquinas, who regarded the distinction as both “fitting” and “adequate.” Fitting, because each human being, as a rational being, occupies himself with what is most delightful to him, whether that is the pursuit of knowledge or a life of active service. Adequate, because Jacob had two wives and no more, and Lazarus had only two sisters… . Continue Reading »

About this time each year, I survey my theology students on the question, “Does the sun rise?” Most say, No. This year, one said it’s “super-obvious” that the sun does not rise. They fall into nervous silence when I insist that it does. The occasion for my survey is an annual discussion of Galileo’s famous 1615 letter to the Grand Duchess Christina. During a dinner party with the Grand Duchess, Benedictine friar Benedetto Castelli defended the new heliocentric theory and refuted the Scriptural arguments that another member of the party advanced in favor of geocentricity… . Continue Reading »