Political religiosity in America is a strange bird, and add journalism to the mix and it approachs mythical proportions. Consider Howard Dean: Yesterday, Drudge was listing a report on Dean’s plan to highlight his religious background as he campaigns in the South. Dean is a Congregationalist who says Jesus has had a significant impact on his life and that he reads the Bible daily. He left the Episcopal church a number of years ago over a local bike path controversy... Read more
The resurrection of Jesus, and our participation in it, is of course foundational for the “comic” vision of Christianity. Barth, however, expresses this in a particularly sharp way, when he describes how the Christian looks back to death and the grave as a past event, and forward to resurrection. The resurrection, in short, shifts the location of death in history, the individual’s life story, and literature. For ancients, death always remains ahead, and is always only what remains ahead –... Read more
Sermon outline for December 28: What Are Our Plans for Moscow? INTRODUCTION During the recent furor, the question has been posed to Christ Church (and, implicitly, to Trinity), “What are your plans for Moscow?” To answer that question, we must understand what the church is, and what she’s called to be and do. One historian of early Christianity has called Christianity a movement for “urban revitalization.” More theologically put, the church is God’s city on earth, called to witness and... Read more
Poor Joseph, we say. He’s on the margins of every Christmas story, every depiction in art, every medieval dramatic rendition. Leave it to Barth to find theological significance in Joseph’s marginality: Speaking of the Virgin Birth of Jesus, Barth says that “The male has nothing to do with this birth. What is involved here is, if you like, a divine act of judgment. To what is to being here man is to contribute nothing by his action and initiative. Man... Read more
You know the scene in the movie: The hero, finding that he can no longer resort to half-measures and fighting through intermediaries, decides he must take things into his own hands, and challenges the villain in hand-to-hand combat. That is incarnation. Read more
David Martin’s Christian Language and Its Mutations: Essays in Sociological Understanding has some good moments. The big problem first: He seems to assume that sacred and secular are divided by a given (though fluid) boundary, and thus argues that Christianity must “adjust to” and “compromise with” the languages and mores of the secular world. But Christianity must so adjust itself only if we assume that the secular is already THERE, and that it’s fundamentally impenetrable to Christian truth. And this,... Read more
When I see books with titles like Ideas That Changed the World I have one main reaction: Suspicion. That suspicion increases when the book is filled with splashy photos and sidebars full of soundbite-sized analysis. In the hands of Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, author of Millennium and an acclaimed history of food, the genre is a success. Focusing on ideas that have offered “new ways of envisioning the big picture,” the book ranges from a discussion of cannibalism and black magic to... Read more
At 23, James Frey had already been a drunk for over a decade, was addicted to crack, wanted in several states, subject to fits of violent Fury, a battered mess. Without knowing how, he ended up in a rehab center in Minnesota. A Million Little Pieces (Doubleday, 2003) is the harrowing and heart-rending story of his recovery and restoration to normal life. Written in a taut, lyrical, and thoroughly unsentimental prose, Frey’s book is filled with sharply observed characters, and... Read more
David Bentley Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite looks to be one of those books to savor, read, reread, mark, and inwardly digest. I’ve only read a bit of it, but it’s as masterful as his articles. (Stylisically, the book is by turns moving and maddening; I’ve never seen anyone use more semi-colons than Hart; and some of the rhetoric is a shade just this side of purple; but when he’s more controlled the writing is transfixing.) Late in the... Read more
A recent issue of Science News reports that rats live longer if they are constantly stimulated by novelty. Rats that have nothing to look forward to but another day in the maze or on the wheel die sooner. That may say something about human beings, but it certainly gives us help for getting rid of rats. Read more
Leithart
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