Rowan Williams on Whether He is Nietzchean

I had more to say than a comment thread would sustain, so I repair to my own blog. In a recent post dealing with Rowan Williams and the current Anglican controversy over the ordination of homosexual bishops, Craig Carter makes the following assertion:
Essentially, the point made in this article is that by fighting for unity, [...]

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Giving Up

There’s all kinds of talk on Ash Wednesday about what you’re going to give up for lent.  Coffee, meat, sweets, cigarettes, beer, sex, what have you.  Generally, this doing without is undertaken with a view towards putting off distractions, entering into purer states of contemplation, and in general getting your head right so you can [...]

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A Thought on Martyring

Martyrdom is the only way to witness to a truth that is not ours.  The witness to human truth cannot properly even be called witness, for it does not exist outside of itself.  Human truth is self-generated, and therefore must be self-defended.  The greatest witness to the fact that God’s truth exists outside of and [...]

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Tripp York’s The Purple Crown

Tripp York, The Purple Crown: The Politics of Martyrdom (Scottsdale, PA: Herald, 2007), 200 pp.
In this review, I wish to second the back cover endorsement given to this book by William Cavanaugh: “I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the relevance of martyrdom to contemporary discipleship.” This book will win few converts, and [...]

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Some Thoughts on Primal Alienation

An interesting aspect Karl Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts is that it’s much celebrated central theme of the alienation or estrangement of labor is actually Marx’s attempt to give a credible account of the fall of man. He writes.
We must avoid repeating the mistake of the political economist, who bases his explanations on some imaginary primordial [...]

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Chris K. Huebner’s A Precarious Peace

Chris K. Huebner, A Precarious Peace: Yoderian Explorations on Theology, Knowledge, and Identity (Scottsdale, PA: Herald, 2006), 249 pp.
A former doctoral student of Stanley Hauerwas at Duke, and current Assistant Professor of Theology and Ethics at Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Huebner is a genuine rising star in among Anabaptist Theologians. Along with [...]

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Scripture, Tradition, and Slavery, Part One: Did Paul Endorse Slavery?

In a review for Commonweal of Mark Noll’s book, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, Eugene McCarraher lays the blame for the institution of chattel Slavery in America at the core of Protestantism, the doctrine of sola scriptura. Ultimately, he affirms a reading of the Bible as a document that reflects the oppressive biases [...]

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J. Kameron Carter on Baptism

J. Kameron Carter has been an exciting discovery for me lately, and I’d like to pass on a cool little essay entitled “Whiteness as a False Reality: the Baptismal Identity of ‘the Now, but Not Yet,’” which explores some of the similarities between the film The Matrix and baptism.
[Afro-Christians'] entry into Christianity was a baptismal [...]

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Abstract for a Paper in Progress: The Subjectivity of the Free-Church

My aim in this essay is to reformulate the notion of the voluntary character of the church specifically in the context of its perversion in the ideological matrix of late capitalism. In spite of the dangers of individualism, the voluntary nature of the church remains a crucial manifestation of the radically interruptive nature of the [...]

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Review of James Torrance’s Worship, Community & the Triune God of Grace

If the Torrance brothers stand for anything, it is the mediation of Christ. T.F. Torrance’s book by that title is labeled as a “devotional theology” on account of its scant academic apparatus, but it remains an extremely dense and thoroughly argued presentation of Christ’s mediatorial role between God and Man as the core of [...]

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