Fight Like an Amateur: Affirmation as Cultural Warfare
[dropcap]G[/dropcap].K. Chesterton once said that the true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him. I believe that it is increasingly difficult for our culture to understand what Chesterton means. To understand why love is a more powerful motivator than hate, we must grasp that there are ultimate commitments involved in either posture: One fights out of a fundamental desire to destroy and dominate and the other fights because it is compelled by love to defend the good of the beloved. Think for a moment about all the … Continue Reading “Fight Like an Amateur: Affirmation as Cultural Warfare”
Germanic Jesus | Peter Leithart
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Germanic presence in Northern Europe posed a significant challenge to Christian missionaries, writers, and poets, which are well described by Peter Brown at the end of his Rise of Western Christendom. On the one hand, there was the intellectual difficulty. Christianity originally arose within the Greco-Roman sphere, and even though it was Jewish, the Judaism in which Jesus and Paul operated was nestled within the Roman Empire, and had been flavored by compromise and conflicts with various Gentile powers since the Babylonian exile. Sorting through how Christian faith related to Greek and Roman culture was tricky, but there was … Continue Reading “Germanic Jesus | Peter Leithart”