The so called Age of Enlightenment, especially after Kant and Hegel, had a standard catch cry of “progress”, that inexorable march towards a future horizon that would be better than what came before. This march can only be facilitated with the casting off of the vestiges of what came before, and that meant the casting off of traditional modes of life. One of the elements of tradition that was supposed to have been left behind is religious adherence, broadly defined.... Read more
Catholic Youth Broken Bay, the part of the Diocese of Broken Bay’s Office for Evangelisation, recently organised a “Twilight Talk” of Redeeming Flesh: The Way of the Cross with Zombie Jesus. The talk, summarising the new book published by Cascade last month, was aptly held in a restaurant that once served as the local morgue. A podcast of the talk is available for listening by visiting CYBB’s soundcloud page or alternatively the Campion College Australia soundcloud page. Mentions of the... Read more
This is a guest contribution by Kamila Soh, who holds a Masters in Architecture from the University of Western Australia and currently works in interior design and administration. Her keen, theologically inflected aesthetic sense deserves a wide reading. May this be the first of many posts from her. The French philosopher Simone Weil said that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” It is our primary means of connection, which leads to astonishment at both the goodness and... Read more
This post is a part of the Patheos Catholic Channel series, “Catholicity: Identity and Its Discontents.” Read more here. To give some of the flavour of this symposium, Steel Magnificat has furnished a post about what the public face of Catholicism appears to be or should be (and just added another post on the normalcy of Catholic culture), while A Little Bit of Nothing has looked at the relationship between identity and gift. Jappers and Janglers, meanwhile, has provided a... Read more
The Austrian political philosopher Eric Voegelin, in spite of his championing of a participation in a transcendent order, always cautioned against any political order that made any stipulations from a civic body that were in accordance with this participation. The mantra he used to describe this was a caution against “immanentising the eschaton“. Voegelin had reason to give this caution in this work, having been privy to the establishment of orders that, whether consciously or not, did promise to bring... Read more
Time travel evokes thoughts of the Tardis and “Back to the Future”, where the outlandish idea of moving through time is often accompanied by depictions of equally outlandish machines and figures. What if one said that time travel is already happening, more often and in more mundane ways than we tend to think? The cultural niche known as steampunk, where depictions of technology, culture and society is combined with Victorian-era inflections, is one case study that betrays something in a... Read more
In Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism, James K.A. Smith alerted us to the work of the Canadian scholar Jean-Francois Lyotard, whose “On the Postmodern Condition” coined the famous term “the incredulity towards metanarratives”. According to Smith’s reading of Lyotard, this incredulity spoke of a suspicion towards all-encompassing stories that organise lives while presuming their account of the world as self-evident to all. This incredulity, Smith wrote, opened up a path for narratives that admit their narrativity to play an active public role... Read more
A previous post mentioned the imminent arrival of Matthew Tan’s second book, Redeeming Flesh: the Way of the Cross with Zombie Jesus, published by Cascade Books, an imprint of Wipf and Stock. As an update to that, this is to announce that the book is now available for sale and can be purchased at most popular online bookstores. You can also get an online purchase discount by visiting Wipf and Stock’s website. The book has received three kind endorsements on... Read more
A lunchroom discussion on suggestions for suitable relaxing reading to bring along on a Mediterranean holiday, soon turned its attention to RJ Snell’s Acedia & Its Discontents, which was used as a focal text in a course at Campion College Australia on theological anthropology. The discussion hinged on a point made in the book that the heart of the sin of sloth was not laziness but autonomy, a point made in a previous post. To this point an incisive question was... Read more
Cascade Books, the imprint of Wipf and Stock, will soon send to print the manuscript of Matthew Tan’s second book Redeeming Flesh: The Way of the Cross with Zombie Jesus. The good people at Wipf and Stock recently finished and forwarded the cover art which is attached above. More details will follow in later posts, and look out for stock arriving soon at wipfandstock.com Read more
The Divine Wedgie
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