Resident Theologian
About the Blog
Intentionality
Some thoughts on the role of “intentionality discourse” in the Christian life.
Robert Farrar Capon on God, matter, wine, and things
A long excerpt from Robert Farrar Capon’s The Supper of the Lamb.
Enchantment
A brief word on the renewed interest in "enchantment" over against "disenchantment."
Theological Amnesia: dreaming a book to write in my dotage
Using Clive James’s book as a springboard for imagining a similar volume dedicated to theological themes and writers from the twentieth century.
My latest: a review of Tara Isabella Burton
A link to my latest publication, a review in Commonweal of Tara Isabella’s latest book Self-Made.
The smartest people I’ve ever known
A little rant about well-educated secular folks who look down on religious people.
Every fantasy a comedy, every comedy a theodicy
A reflection on Osten Ard, fantasy writing, and theodicy within modern fantasy.
Sin, preaching, and the therapeutic gospel
Where is sin in contemporary preaching? What are ways to resist reducing the gospel to therapy? Some reflections.
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.
Beliefs of the post-Christian West
Early on in Mark Sayers’ 2016 book Disappearing Church he outlines, in the form of propositions, the social imaginary or set of presuppositions that suffuse and animate the contemporary post-Christian context in the West.
Burkeman’s atelic self-help
Oliver Burkeman’s new book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, is well worth your time. It is a splendid meditation on what it means to be a finite creature and what follows for making decisions, down to the most mundane, about how to spend one’s vanishingly small allotment of hours in this, our only world, with this, our only life.
The ache and the Austinite
Richard Beck, my friend and colleague here at ACU, enjoyed my post yesterday on “Needing Jesus” but pushed back on some elements of it. In particular he thought what I took with one hand I gave back with the other. That is, I denied that our hypothetical 26-year old happy Austinite was “secretly unhappy” before waxing eloquent about . . . just how secretly unhappy he must be, sinsick and lacking Jesus as he is. Moreover, he wasn’t sure just how I am (we are) supposed to get Mr. Contentment into church if we aren’t filling him in, through conversation or other means, just how secretly unhappy he is.
Secular Scruton
After Roger Scruton died last year, I resolved to read back through some of his most important writing on culture, philosophy, and politics. Two things in particular—beyond the usual, and correct, comments on his erudition, intelligence, and lucid prose style—struck me in doing so.
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.