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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Men of Steel and Flesh
Since Thetis dipped Achilles in the Styx, men (especially men) have dreamed hot dreams of invulnerability. The Greeks kept dreaming, but they knew these dreams couldn’t come true. Even Achilles”best of the Achaeans, half divine and a tornado of destruction in his aristeia, his moment of glory”this Achilles dies a pathetic death, ambushed and pierced by an arrow at his one narrow point of weakness. A heel of flesh marks the great gulf fixed between the glory of mortals and that of the immortal gods … Continue Reading »
Out of the Cave
Last week, I finished a book manuscript. During the last two weeks of work, I spent nearly every waking hour in front of a computer screen, reviewing notes, examining a handful of remaining sources. It snowed, I’m told, and there was snow on the ground to prove it, but I was submerged too deep to notice. Several days I realized late in the morning that I was still wearing my bathrobe. I surfaced for meals and to grab another cup of coffee, but my mind was never fully engaged with anything besides the book… . Continue Reading »
Christmas as Heavenly Economy
Since the early centuries of the church, Christians have thought of giving and receiving gifts as a fitting way to celebrate the incarnation. The logic is simple: God so loved the world that he gave; so should we. But this simple practice embodies not only a profound theology, but a profound vision of community, one that becomes clear when we consider two New Testament passages that quote from the manna story of Exodus… . Continue Reading »
The Christian Origins of Islam
Near the bottom of the pit of hell, Dante encounters a man walking with his torso split from chin to groin, his guts and other organs spilling out. “See how I tear myself!” the man shrieks. “See how Mahomet is deformed and torn!” For us, the scene is not only gruesome but surprising, for Dante is not in a circle of false religion but in a circle reserved for those who tear the body of Christ. Like many medieval Christians, Dante views Islam less as a rival religion than as a schismatic form of Christianity… . Continue Reading »
The Religious Right After Reaganism
I’ve made adjustments to bring this piece up to date, but I wrote most of it in January 2009 when President Obama was inaugurated for his first term. Friends told me at the time that I was overwrought, that Obama’s election was a fluke. Tuesday, I think, proved them wrong. Something died this week. It probably died four years ago, but Tuesday it was pronounced dead… . Continue Reading »
Voice of the Martyrs
Last week, gunmen from the Islamic sect Boko Haram attacked the Church of the Brethren in the village of Atagara in northern Nigeria, killing two and torching the church on their way out. Over several days, the terrorist group killed dozens in the same region and forced hundreds to flee. In the northeastern city of Potiskum, thirty-one people were murdered over a three-day period recently, and a church was burned… . Continue Reading »
An Evangelical Case for a Catholic Sensibility
Evangelicals gladly assent to Jean Daniélou’s claim that the mission of the church “continues the mighty works, the mirabilia Dei, recorded in the two Testaments” and agree that “God still accomplishes his mighty works, in the conversion and sanctification of souls.” Few Evangelicals, though, would make sense of his further claim that “The working of God’s power among us is through the sacraments.” … Continue Reading »
Death to the Copulative and Long Live the Queen!
Some centuries ago, someone (a politician, I suppose) disconnected theology from the rest of the academy, hustled it down a dark hallway, and locked it in a basement office with stern warnings to “Stay put” and “Behave.” Theologians, by and large a meek race, complied. They have spent their time holding long seminars and filling shelves of books with monographs on details of Scripture, on historical studies, on the arcana of systematic theology”many of them of great erudition and enduring value for the church… . Continue Reading »
The Nude in a Pornographic Age
We live in a pornographic age that falls dismally short of creating what Pope Paul VI called a “climate favorable to education in chastity.” But we misconstrue the problem if we worry only about the sheer number of unclothed bodies, the sheer expanse of exposed flesh, that appears on TV, in film, or on the web. The fundamental problem is not a lack of clothing but the widespread failure of mass and high culture to represent the truth about the human body… . Continue Reading »
The Dark Side of Gratitude
In The Gift, first published in the 1920s, the French ethnologist Marcel Mauss describes several Pacific Rim “gift economies.” Mauss argues that exchanges among these tribes are radically different from exchanges in money economies. In capitalism, trade is a utilitarian pursuit of self-interest; you don’t need to befriend the baker or butcher so long as he provides useful goods and services… . Continue Reading »
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