Peter J. Leithart is President of the Theopolis Institute, Birmingham, Alabama. He is the author, most recently, of Creator (IVP).
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Peter J. Leithart
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Rearing Slaves, Rearing Sons
You’ve heard the horror stories about the schools: kindergartens with a dose of amoral sex education; teachers sowing gender confusion with the hearty support of administrators; violence and widespread drug use in the tony prep schools that train tomorrow’s elites; depression, eating disorders, . . . . Continue Reading »
How to Preach About Bruce Jenner
Should pastors grease the Kardashian celebrity machine by mentioning Bruce Jenner from the pulpit? There are good arguments for ignoring the whole thing, but I think that’s a pastoral mistake. So much of our cultural trajectory converges on Bruce: our rampant Gnosticism, our confidence in technology, our moral libertarianism and determined flight from biblical standards, our cult of fame, our sexual self-contradictions. Bruce Jenner will be forgotten soon enough, but what he represents isn’t going away, because transgressiveness is one of the few cultural imperatives that we are not permitted to transgress.If we preach about Bruce, what should we say? When I asked the Jewish theologian David Novak how a synagogue would respond, his answer was stunning in its simplicity: First, “Jews would not recognize Jenner as a woman”; then, “Torah forbids castration.” Castration doesn’t turn a man into a woman. It only leaves him a damaged man. Continue Reading »
Seven Spirits of God: A Pentecost Exhortation
What do we have when we have the Spirit? We have everything.All the treasures of God, hidden away in the depths of God from before the foundation of the world, become ours through the Spirit of Pentecost. He is the Gift from the Father and the Son, the Gift above all gifts, the Gift containing all gifts. At Pentecost, God gives God: What more could we ask? Continue Reading »
Crusoe in God's World
Partly a rehabilitation of Ian Watts’s Rise of the Novel, partly a theological deepening of Watts’s thesis, Joseph Bottum’s splendid essay on “The Novel as Protestant Art Form” is a literary education. Bottum hits all the fundamental issues, and he hits most of them out of the park.He defends the once-standard judgment that Don Quixote is the “door by which we entered the modern novel,” since Cervantes’s mockery irreversibly cut the novel off from medieval romance. Despite complaints from Byron and others, “Cervantes won, his work too good not to provide us with permanently comic lenses through which to view that lost time.” Something of the “supernatural thickness” of medieval romance reappeared in the spooky Gothic novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but there was no going back. Continue Reading »
Teach Us to Pray
Christians have watched in helpless horror at the release of videos of masked ISIS warriors shooting and beheading Coptic Christians on a lonely stretch of North Africa beach. We can help, by diligent prayer for brothers and sisters who fall victim to Muslim brutes.But how should we pray? Continue Reading »
A Throne in the Grave
Last Sunday, Western Christians celebrated Easter, and in a few days Eastern churches will observe Pascha. Over the course of eight days, most of the world’s two billion Christians will have sung of Jesus’s resurrection, listened again as the glad apostles see their Lord, and heard bold talk of new life and new creation. Continue Reading »
Every Sunday Is Palm Sunday
When Jesus enters Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, everything changes. As Mark tells it, Jesus has been moving about in secret, teaching in private, refusing to draw attention to his miracles, and speaking in coded parables. He cleanses a leper but then warns, “See that you say nothing to anyone” (Mark 1:44). Peter confesses that Jesus is the Christ, but Jesus instructs him “to tell no one about it” (8:30), and after the transfiguration he “gave them orders not to relate to anyone what they had seen, until the Son of Man should rise from the dead” (9:9). It’s an anti-PR campaign. Continue Reading »
Liturgy and Interchangeable Sexes
First Timothy 2:12–14 is one of the texts most commonly cited in debates over women’s ordination: “I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet. For it was Adam who was first created, then Eve. And not Adam was deceived, but the woman being deceived fell into transgression.” Continue Reading »
Receptive Ecumenism
If the Church is going to face the challenges of this new century, she will have to face them as a united Church. Nothing has so weakened our witness as our tragic divisions. Nothing has made the Gospel so implausible, if not preposterous. Division has deprived us of the weapons we need for the spiritual battles that are on the horizon. Continue Reading »
Puritan Sacramentalism
Perhaps only Puritans can give sacraments their due. Continue Reading »
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