Bashing Twitter’s Bashers

Roger Cohen is tired of Twitter bashers: “It’s not easy, being of a certain generation, to avoid the dinner conversation that veers into a lament about the short attention spans, constant device distraction, sad superficiality and online exhibitionism of a younger generation geared to . . . . Continue Reading »

Charismatic work

“Work is charismatic,” writes Craig Keen in After Crucifixion (80-1). Keen elaborates in a beautiful passage:“What we are given to work upon precedes us, a gift sent our way the first five days of creation, the days when the Spirit hovered over the face of the waters, before . . . . Continue Reading »

Multiple Enlightenment

Milbank (Beyond Secular Order: The Representation of Being and the Representation of the People) points out that the Enlightenment was not simple one thing: “it can bedivided into (a) a Christian and sometimes post -Christian Ciceronian Stoicreaction against the voluntarism of ‘modern . . . . Continue Reading »

Political anthropology

Milbank’s Beyond Secular Order: The Representation of Being and the Representation of the Peoplepresupposes that there is a homology between metaphysics and politics. He identifies four assumptions of modern philosophy: “(1) the univocity rather than analogy of being; ( 2) knowledgeby . . . . Continue Reading »

Hero systems

Richard Beck (The Slavery of Death) quotes some impressive passages from Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death. They’reworthy of re-quoting.“This is what society is and always has been: asymbolic action system, a structure of statuses and roles, customsand rules for behavior, . . . . Continue Reading »

Denial

Observing that Christians today “sing songs of orientation in a world increasingly experienced as disoriented,” Walter Bruggemann suggests that the church is in a state of denial:“The church is less an evangelical defiance guided by faith, and must more a frightened, numb denial . . . . Continue Reading »

Ark of Empire

Jeremiah’s message to Judah is that the Lord has given the earth into hands of his “servant,” Nebuchadnezzar: “I have given all these lands into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, My servant, and I have given him also the wild animals of the field to serve him” . . . . Continue Reading »

Triune Pastor

In his book on Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God: In Your Light We Shall See Light, Christopher Beeley takes a chapter to describe the Trinitarian foundations of Gregory’s theology of pastoral care. Gregory’s Orations, he points out, are organized to . . . . Continue Reading »

Fear of Death

Orthodox theologian John Romanides describes in The Ancestral Sin(162-3) how the fear of death leads to evil practices and habits: “Through the power of death and the devil, sin that reigns in men gives rise to fear and anxiety and to the general instinct of self-preservation or survival. . . . . Continue Reading »