Peter Leithart

For many in an older generation, the Bible and the Collected Shakespeare were the two indispensable books, and thus their sense of life and history was shaped by the best and best-told stories. And they were the wiser for it....

The best stories subtly weave themes and characters and symbols into a stunning final tapestry. For many Christians, sadly, the Old Testament is merely a jumble of moralistic stories and weird rituals, genealogies, and historical chronicles....

Samuel. Saul. David. Goliath. Jonathan. When we think of 1 & 2 Samuel, these names and the stories that make them memorable generally come to mind. But these narratives are more than mere history. Peter Leithart offers here a typological reading of 1 & 2 Samuel as a unified book.

As one of the supreme Christian epic poems, Dante's Divine Comedy provides not only far more personality and emotional depth than the pagan epics, it also opens up all the issues on which Western history turns truth, beauty, goodness, sin, sanctification, and triumph.