The following is an interview with Sam Chan (Ph.D., M.D.), an Aussie theologian, preacher, and medical doctor who writes and gives talks from the Bible about life, faith and work. Sam is a public speaker for City Bible Forum and works as a physician in Sydney. Sam has just published the book, Preaching as the Word of God: Answering an Old Question with Speech-Act Theory. How did you land on the subject of preaching for your main research interest... Read more
The NY Times posted an interactive graph recently (updated today) suggesting that the probability of Hillary Clinton winning the election this November is, not surprisingly, quite high. How high? The Upshot’s elections model suggests that Hillary Clinton is favored to win the presidency, based on the latest state and national polls. A victory by Mr. Trump remains quite possible: Mrs. Clinton’s chance of losing is about the same as the probability that an N.F.L. kicker misses a field goal. Now... Read more
I was raised conservative evangelical (Southern Baptist). I went to a conservative evangelical seminary. If I had to count on my hands how many times I heard the mantra that “conservative, ‘orthodox’ theology grows churches, while liberal, ‘heterodox’ theology kills them,” I would quickly run out of fingers. Now there’s surely some truth in the notion that conservative churches attract more people, generally speaking, than liberal ones do. There’s enough ambiguity and uncertainty in life; many people like their religion... Read more
Remember the big story last year about Dan Price, the millennial super-cool CEO of Gravity Payments who raised the minimum wage in his company to $70,000 a year? I remember it because I lauded it back then as a great thing and the kind of move that demonstrated a courageously counter-intuitive kind of leadership, reflective of values that bucked the usual corporate capitalist emphasis on profits, profits, profits. Well a lot has happened since then. An article in Esquire, “The... Read more
Fall is just around the corner. “Back to school” specials are on the shelves. So what better time for a little reflection on education? Education is something we all do, we’ve all experienced, and we all value. But we don’t take much time to think about education. So I searched far and wide and way back into history to find the ten most influential leaders in education. The thinkers I found turned out also to be progressive (for their contexts)... Read more
America is notoriously and incurably religious. And political. Most Americans, it seems, like our politics to go along with a big dose of religion, too. Although, sometimes it’s hard to know the difference between the two. In historian Barry Hankins fine (and entertaining) book, Jesus and Gin: Evangelicalism, the Roaring Twenties, and Today’s Culture Wars, he closes with a reflection on the role of religion in politics today (published in 2010, mind you): While evangelicals join traditional Catholics in applauding... Read more
It’s not a sexy title, but these aren’t pretty times. For the past four or five decades, we’ve thought of ourselves as living in “postmodern times,” or as under the influences of “postmodernity” or “postmodernism.” The postmodern being, of course, either a reaction to modernism or an extension or intensification of it. Modernism, the previous age, involved the quest for universals, for trans-cultural knowledge, for “absolute truth.” Often utopian in orientation, it was also often elitist and racist in its... Read more
In contrast to the age of revolution, which took action, the present age is an age of publicity, the age of miscellaneous announcements: nothing happens but still there is instant publicity. An insurrection in this day and age is utterly unimaginable; such a manifestation of power would seem ridiculous to the calculating sensibleness of the age. However, a political virtuoso might be able to perform an amazing tour de force of quite another kind. He would issue invitations to a... Read more
I’m late on the hot-take, but so it goes. I was glad to see this thoughtful reflection on Melania Trump’s obvious plagiarism–and the emotional affect that coming across such an egregious and very public display of plagiarism has on professional teachers. I’ve taught theology full-time now for a decade. I’ve come across my fair share of plagiarism: some egregious, and some minor. But plagiarism is plagiarism. Typically, when it’s a clear case (whether a paragraph or two is lifted, or... Read more
I just came across a great little book, called Political Theology: Contemporary Challenges and Directions. It’s the result of a unique conference at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, in 2010. One of the contributors is Johann Baptist Metz, who along with Moltmann, was instrumental in establishing the “New Political Theology” of Europe in the 1960s. Toward the end of his essay in this book, Metz writes: What is to keep our globalized world from imploding after all in uncontrollable religious... Read more
Unsystematic Theology
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