Resident Theologian
About the Blog
Blakely, Singal, and “stories”
I have a new piece in the latest issue of The New Atlantis called “Statistics as Storytelling.” The print journal is in subscribers’ hands; the issue will be online sometime this week, I imagine. (It’s jam-packed full of goodness, by the way: Nicholas Carr, Matthew Crawford, Phil Christman, Ari Schulman, Caitrin Keiper, Addison Del Mastro, and many others.) My piece is a long essay review of Jason Blakely’s book We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power. I’ll link to it in a separate post once it’s up.
A test for your doctrine of Scripture
Here’s a test for you. Suppose that scientists created a sort of time machine. Not one that could transport someone from the present into the past. But one that could give anyone in the present a perfect window onto the past: clear, detailed, and controlled. Like a God’s-eye documentary recording of all that transpired in then and there, whenever and wherever. You wouldn’t be able to affect or change anything—what’s past is past, what’s done is done—but you could observe it.
Running errata
The first feeling one has upon publishing a book is a mixture of relief and elation, at least ideally. The second is the dawning realization that whatever mistakes one didn’t fix before the manuscript went to the printers are now there, in black and white, forever.
Subjunctive scholarship
If you read enough biblical scholarship, you come to realize that one of the guild’s endemic features—for at least a century, probably two—is an overweening confidence in its claims. Such claims usually partake of a rhetoric of calm certainty; all too often what are contestable judgments based on slim evidence are instead asserted as facts, or at least as bearing a supreme likelihood of being true.
Axioms of Christian exegesis
I … rejoice, as any interpreter of scripture should, to find such a clear case of prima facie contradiction [in the text]; such instances are efficacious in prompting theological thought because of the axiom that the canon of scripture is not incoherent.
Academic support
The academy is often a very lonely place. The work can be grueling, the odds of success long, the competition ferocious, the hours punishing, the pay insufficient, the rewards minuscule, the expectations inhuman, the atmosphere inhumane.
Listening to Lewis
One of my goals for 2021 was to listen to fewer podcasts and more audiobooks—a double good, that. One of my strategies was to find novels and nonfiction on the shorter side, to gain some momentum and feel like I was making it through actual books rather than slogging through interminable chapters.
The catholicity of art
In Jamie Smith’s latest monthly newsletter—to which I recommend you subscribe—he has a reflection on the relationship between art and faith. In particular he has a bone to pick with those well-meaning Christian writers and artists whose approach to art is (in my words) variations on, or elevated versions of, the God’s Not Dead approach.
James and le Carré (TLC, 3)
P. D. James and John le Carré are two of my favorite novelists. I’ve written about each of them before. A question occurred to me as I was reading le Carré’s Our Game this week, and that question reminded me of a question I asked on Twitter a couple years ago.
Twitter loci communes
One of these days Twitter will be no more. Or at least my Twitter account. Whether that future is distant or near, it will happen. I stopped actively tweeting or even retweeting anything beyond links to my published work a couple months into the pandemic. That was after resuming “normal” Twitter activity following a self-imposed months-long hiatus.
My new book is out! Order The Doctrine of Scripture today!
My first book, The Doctrine of Scripture, is officially out and ready for purchase. Technically it became available on Friday, August 27, but the book wasn’t yet in my hands and it wasn’t yet available for order online. (Does a book really exist if you can’t add it to your Amazon cart?) But yesterday I received my author’s copies of the book in the mail and the book appeared on Amazon. It’s real! It exists! It’s alive!
Foundation
Later this month the television adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation will premiere on Apple+. I had been planning on writing something about it, then doubled down on that plan when I read a piece resorting to that laziest but most common of critical terms of approval these days: the R-word. You know what it is. “Relevant.”
A Christian university
What makes a Christian university Christian? Phrased differently, what’s the difference between a Christian university, a “Christian In Name Only” university, and a post-Christian university?
Saint Monica (TLC, 2)
Today is the feast of St. Monica, the mother of St. Augustine of Hippo. St. Monica is (if you will allow it) my self-appointed patron saint. She is an inspiration and a sacred exemplar of Christian fidelity, maternal love, and undying hope. A couple years back Matthew Rothaus Moser, a theologian at Azusa Pacific, wrote this on Twitter:
New essay: “Market Apocalypse” in Mere Orthodoxy
My latest is up at Mere Orthodoxy this morning. Titled “Market Apocalypse,” it’s a review essay of Rodney Clapp’s new book, Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age. Here’s a taste:
The adventure of history
This week I’ve been listening to Ernst Gombrich’s A Little History of the World on Audible. I’ve had it on my shelf for a while but I decided it might be good in audio form. I was right: it is wonderful. I’m a little over halfway through, and it’s been sheer pleasure.
Karen Kilby book forum in Political Theology
At long last, the newest issue of the academic journal Political Theology is out, and it features a book forum I organized and edited for the journal. The forum, or roundtable discussion, is devoted to Karen Kilby’s latest book, a collection of mostly previously published essays titled God, Evil, and the Limits of Theology. Here is how the forum is laid out:
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.
Charity
What if, when a person you are reading or listening to states a conviction or comes to a conclusion with which you disagree, your first thought were not that such a person must, by necessary consequence, be wicked, stupid, cruel, incurious, unserious, or otherwise worthy of public censure and ridicule?
Religious theism or irreligious atheism
Timothy Jackson teaches Christian ethics at Emory University. I was fortunate enough to take a class with him when I earned my MDiv at Candler School of Theology, the Methodist seminary on campus. I’m currently reading his latest book for a review I’ll write later this month; the book is about the Shoah, anti-Semitism, and Christian supersessionism.