Reflecting on our culture’s penchant for remakes in the NYTBR, James Parker traces the phenomenon to a “commercial factor here: the enormous built-in timidity of the culture industry, which will always be happier with a remake than a new thing. Once youve assembled a hero, a hero that works, you should keep using him. Those weird 70s movies about nobody in particular, with bad lighting and sort of a bummed-out feel at the end who wants to watch them anymore?”... Read more
Jonathan Ree reviews Bruno Latour’s An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Modernsin the TLS, and along the way sums up some of Latour’s contributions to social science. Latour’s early work in the anthropology of science, emphasizing the “social construction” of scientific facts, earned him denunciations as a “relativist.” Latour himself protested: “When he spoke of ‘social construction,’ he said, he was not belittling scientific facts, but describing the tortuous processes through which they are established. When... Read more
Tim Parks’s piece asking why published authors are shown so much respect begins with the career of Salman Rushdie. An easy mark. But Parks’s larger point still stands: “No one is treated with more patronizing condescension than the unpublished author or, in general, the would-be artist. At best he is commiserated. At worst mocked. He has presumed to rise above others and failed. . . .Why do we have this uncritical reverence for the published writer? Why does the simple... Read more
When Peter comes to the door of the house where the disciples are praying for him, they think it’s Peter’s “angel” (Acts 12:15). The thing at the door is recognizably Peter, but they don’t think it’s Peter in the flesh. It’s still the person, but not the embodied person, so they believe.Aggeloshere means “ghost” or “soul” or “spirit” or whatever we might call that personal reality that remains after death. The usage is intriguing, and it’s worth pausing over the... Read more
The name John in Revelation 1:1 links the seer up with John the Baptist, the messenger who came from God to announce the coming of Christ. Some (JM Ford,Revelation (The Anchor Bible, Vol. 38)) have suggested that this points to John the Baptist and his circle as the source of the gospel. Thats mistaken, but I think the allusion is there, and many of the themes of Revelation recapitulate themes that arise at the beginning of Jesus ministry. John the... Read more
Cyril O’Regan (Theology and the Spaces of Apocalyptic, 60)summarizes Bulgakov’s cautions about turning justice into the master theme of Christian witness. Bulgakov is “sensitive to the horrors that have been committed in the name of justice throughout history and proximally in the Russian Revolution. The thirst for justice all too quickly becomes indistinguishable from blood thirst and reverse hierarchy.” Further, he emphasizes the “real social historical effects of the lie or ideology.” More theologically, he worries that justice “almost invariably... Read more
Liberal Protestants and orthodox Protestant both tell the story of modern Protestantism as the opposition of liberalism and orthodoxy. Already in the 19th century, FC Baur doubted this scheme, and suggested there was a third form of Protestantism – a gnostic Protestantism. Cyril O’Regan’s Gnostic Return in Modernityis the first volume of a massive effort to defend and update Bauer’s thesis: “although histreatment of some figures to whom he casually ascribes gnosis issuperficial, Baurs general grasp of the discourses of... Read more
Jenson makes the remarkable claim that God is Himself culture (in a contribution to God, Truth, and Witness: Engaging Stanley Hauerwas, 160-1): “What it is to be God is given in the Father’s eternal begetting of the Son and enlivening through the Spirit, in the Spirit’s eternal liberating of the Father and the Son for one another, in the Son’s eternal self-giving to the Father in the Spirit. Thus the triune God is nothing but culture, and just so is... Read more
Joshua Davis gives a deft summary of J. Louis Martyn’s understanding of Pauline theology in the introduction to Apocalyptic and the Future of Theology: With and Beyond J. Louis Martyn, which Davis co-edited with Douglas Harinck. Building on but going beyond Kasemann, Martyn attempts to reconstruct Paul’s doctrine of justification by insisting that it is “an objective change in the world’s affairs and not only a subjective change of self-relation.” Creation undergoes a “thoroughgoing transformation of the conditions of existence... Read more
The Sacrificial Body And the Day of Doom: Alchemy And Apocalyptic Discourse in the Protestant Reformationby Urszula Szulakowska links together early modern alchemy with Reformation sacramental theology, art, and interpretations of Revelation. At the center she places Stefan Michelspacher’s 1616Cabala: Spiegel der Kunst und Natur, explaining that this Tyrolean artists and medical doctor “designed his own illustrations which depict in subtle alchemical termssome important themes from the Revelation of St. John concerningthe fate of humanity on the Day of Judgement.... Read more
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