Resident Theologian
About the Blog
Enchantment
A brief word on the renewed interest in "enchantment" over against "disenchantment."
I’m in FT on Andrew Root and “the church in the immanent frame”
Today First Things published my review of Andrew Root’s new book, Churches and the Crisis of Decline: A Hopeful, Practical Ecclesiology for a Secular Age.
On pastors embarrassed to say the great word “God”
The temptations of the immanent frame are often greater for pastors than for the people in the pews, writes Andrew Root.
Turning back the clock
In the last six weeks I’ve read three different books that all makes disparaging reference to “turning back the clock.” By disparaging I mean that they repudiate the usual use to which the cliché is put. Noticing the shared rhetorical move between these works, spread across about four decades in the first half of the twentieth century, made me wonder how common a trope this is for Christian and especially conservative writers in the last hundred or so years. Do share if you know some other ones.
Louis Dupré on symbolism and ontology in religious language
Religious language must, by its very nature, be symbolic: its referent surpasses the objective universe. Objectivist language is fit only to signify things in a one-dimensional universe. It is incapable of referring to another level of reality, as art, poetry, and religion do.