On the Square Today

Peter J. Leithart on restoring theology as the queen of the sciences :

While I’m at it, I’d like to get rid of another copulative. The founders of the modern world kept theology at bay by subdividing theology’s little ghetto. Divide and marginalize has been modernity’s strategy for neutering theology. At one end of the hall were the Old Testament scholars, and far at the other end were the New Testament. Both were discouraged from talking to the systematicians on the floor above. Still today, seminaries have divided biblical faculties. New Testament scholars might know the Greek Bible backward and forward, but rare is the scholar bold enough to venture across the border.

Also today, Noah Glyn and the high holidays and reason’s limits :

High Holiday Jews, even the admitted atheists and agnostics, attend synagogue when they do because they hope to experience something which transcends their daily rituals that are steeped in reason, not religion. Reason ought to play an important role in the lives of religious Jews (and non-Jews, of course), but the essence of all religious faiths is “I believe because I believe.”