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Writing

Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.

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Theopolis News

Constantine the Pious

Trinity House President Peter Leithart will deliver a lecture on "Constantine the Pious" at Oregon State University, Wednesday, October 30, at 7:00 PM.

by Peter LeithartOctober 29, 2013
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Modernity

We Have Never Been Modern

In his rich study, We Have Never Been Modern (Harvard 1993), Bruno Latour describes modernity in terms of a dual process of “purification” and “hybridization.” Purification involves the clean construction of a nature (and science) separated off from society and the self, while hybridization involves mixtures of nature and culture.…

by Peter LeithartOctober 28, 2013
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Books

Conservatives on the Cutting Edge

In James K.A. Smith’s excellent book, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-secular Theology , he explains recent developments in theology and philosophy among mostly post-liberal (some Catholic) theologians. As with everything Dr. Smith writes, his prose is accessible, and written with clarity and precision as he describes the contribution made…

by Troy GreeneOctober 23, 2013
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Biblical Theology

The Creator in Creation, (Part 3)

This is the last of a three-part series. 1:14-19 – The Lights in the Firmament The fourth day is the first day where God sets out His mediators and rulers. In the celestial bodies, God sets out His mediators and rulers in the same single class of created beings. We…

by Andrew BittnerOctober 22, 2013
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Theopolis News

Revealing Revelation

Trinity House President Peter Leithart will be in Chicago this weekend lecturing on Revelation. Sign up here .

by Peter LeithartOctober 17, 2013
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Theopolis News

In the Beginning

Only two more weeks to register for the Trinity House Advent class on the book of Genesis. Register before the late fees kick in!

by Peter LeithartOctober 17, 2013

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Theology

Barthes’s transcendental argument

That’s Barthes not Barth. As in Roland. Prickett suggests that Barthes’ proclamation of the death of the author, his manumission of interpretation from the obsession with the limited, final, “secret” meaning, and his hope for a liberated “anti-theological” and “revolutionary” reading that refuses “to fix meaning” in fact opens the…

August 5, 2008

Conservatism of Poststructuralism

Poststructuralism likes to think itself radical, but Stephen Prickett (Words and the Word) points out that it excludes the possibility of novelty. Barthes says that a text is “a tissue of quotations drawn from the unnumerable centres of culture.” And Kristeva’s notion of intertextuality, on Prickett’s reading, encloses a text…

August 5, 2008
Literature

Novelistic language

A few highlights from James Wood’s chapter on language in How Fiction Works . Early on, he mentions the “old modernist hope” that prose can be “as well written as poetry.” This will require readers and novelists to develop what Nietzsche called a “third ear”: “We have to read musically,…

August 4, 2008
Literature

Bad Books

Lewis remarks on the high difficulty of adverse criticism, noting that the difficulty lies partly in the fact that the defects of bad literature are found in good literature: “The novel before you is bad - a transparent compensatory fantasy projected by a poor, plain woman, erotically starving. Yes, but…

August 4, 2008

Terms of abuse

Lewis describes the process by which words that once expressed and aroused emotions by appealing to the imagination have been emptied of image-content and become purely emotional. “Damn you” used to be a real curse, because people believed in damnation. Now that fewer do, it’s a more or less purely…

August 4, 2008

Limits of language

In Lewis’s defense, he is trying to explain some of the limits of language, which are worth noting (this in the last chapter of Studies in Words ). One limitation has to do with language’s inability “to inform us about complex physical shapes and movements. Hence descriptions of such things…

August 4, 2008

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