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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Do This
I was recently asked to identify the biggest cultural challenge facing American Evangelicals. In my judgment, the biggest cultural challenge is not “out there” in “the culture” but internal“I almost said, “inherent”“to Evangelicalism: the persistent marginalization of the Eucharist in Evangelical church life, piety, and political engagement. Evangelicals will be incapable of responding to the specific challenges of our time with any steadiness or effect until the Eucharist becomes the criterion of all Christian cultural thinking and the source from which all genuinely Christian cultural engagement springs… . Continue Reading »
Heroic Business
To many Americans, business appears to inhabit a morally murky world where good is evil and evil good. I’m not talking about sweatshops, bribery of government officials, or cooking the books. Even the normal norms of business seem, to many, to violate the norms we adhere to elsewhere… . Continue Reading »
Rick Santorum and Secular Natural Law
Rick Santorum recently criticized Obama’s worldview as a “phony theology not based on the Bible.” A few days ago, the Drudge Report resurrected a 2008 speech in which Santorum warned that Satan has it in for the U.S. Santorum’s blatantly religious comments have already made him an object of ridicule and will doubtless cost him support. My cynicism meter goes as wild as anyone’s when politicians talk like this. Still, I find it invigorating. … Continue Reading »
Miracles of Authority
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 »
A Tale of Two Imperialisms
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 »
The Poetry of Sex
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 »
Toward a Sensible Discussion of Empire
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 »
A Politics of Two Advents
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 »
Word Made Martyr
“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 »
How the Church Lost Her Soundscape
“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 »
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