HeyJaredNotes from Beth-Elim
Peter Leithart's notes and essays on Bible, theology, liturgy, culture, politics, literature.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 13
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- Sep 30, 2026
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- Sep 14, 2026
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All Very Good (opens the original)
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The world is a frustrating place to live.We’re confined by space.Our teenage son plays football, our ten-year-old daughter is in ballet, the twins are starting piano, and you have to get to Bible study or your exercise class. You end up spending your whole day in the car; you thought you were a mom, but really you’re a bus driver. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could be in more than one place at a time? Wouldn’t be nice if you could just beam from one place to another, through a phone app or somethi
Money Changes Everything (opens the original)
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William N. Goetzmann, who teaches in the Yale School of Management, opens his Money Changes Everything with a fascinating discussion of what might be called the metaphysics of finance.Finance lies at the foundation of civilization. Ancient Near Eastern civilizations developed writing to keep track of contracts. (I’m skeptical; writing surely first appears as a sacred practice.) Athens owes its golden age as much to finance as to philosophy. China “developed its own financial tradition that enabl
God in the Garden (opens the original)
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Who enters the garden of Gethsemane? Who prays with such passion to the Father? Who, according to Luke, sweats blood? Who accepts the cup and obeys the Father? Who then is arrested, tried, nailed to the cross? Whose corpse is put in the tomb? Who is this?Jesus, of course. But who is Jesus?Matthew tells us at the beginning of his Gospel, with the genealogy that opens the book. The genealogy ends with Jesus. Jesus is the fruit of Israel’s history. The genealogy also begins with Jesus: “This is the
Accidental Revolution (opens the original)
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I celebrated the 250th anniversary of the United States by devoting a chunk of the Fourth to reading a chunk of Gordon Wood’s American Revolution: A History. It’s a lively narrative history of the Founding. Well worth a perusal. A few things stood out.First, Wood steers between hagiography and demonization. America’s history isn’t a “simple morality play,” a “story of right and wrong or good and evil from which moral lessons may be drawn” (xxv). History is complicated,
Israel’s Music (opens the original)
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Jonathan Friedmann’s Music in Biblical Life covers some familiar territory, bloats with semi-relevant digressions about Durkheim and Rudolph Otto and retellings of biblical stories that are only tangentially related to the topic at hand. Still and all, this is an immensely useful book, with fresh insights aplenty. I register a handful.1. In addition to liturgical uses, Scripture identifies many other occasions and uses of music – accompanying labor (Num 21:7), transmitting historical m
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