Resident Theologian
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The problem with evangelicalism
There’s not only one, granted. But this isn’t one of those posts. It’s not a beat-up-on-the-evangelicals manifesto in nine parts. It’s not about evangelicals and politics, or about that popular Christianity Today podcast, or about which marks truly define an evangelical, and whether they ought to be doctrinal or sociological or other. This is a minor little comment about theology and hermeneutics. Here it is.
The endorsements are in for The Church’s Book!
My second book, The Church’s Book: Theology of Scripture in Ecclesial Context, will be published on April 26. That’s just three months away—fourteen weeks from Tuesday, if anyone’s counting. And if you are, pre-order it today! From Eerdmans, from Amazon, from Bookshop … wherever you prefer.
New essay published in Comment
I’m in Comment today with an essay on gratitude to God called “Grace Upon Grace.”
Masterly Spielberg
I’ve written before of my love for Steven Spielberg (whose critical fortunes, having waxed and waned over the decades, seem to have settled into a sort of consensus: whatever your personal feelings for this or that movie of his from the past 10-15 years, it’s undeniable that the man knows where to put the camera), and Tim Markatos, whose writing on film you should read and whose newsletter you should subscribe to, captures perfectly what makes Spielberg so great in his explanation for placing West Side Story at #5 on his list of the best 25 films of 2021…
2021 recap: the blog
This was a banner year for the blog, for the simple reason that after 15 years of blogging I finally own my own turf. I’d been blogging on Google’s Blogger/Blogspot since spring 2006, but in June of 2021 my personal website (this very one) went live, and I moved over four years’ worth of posts from Resident Theologian (itself a successor to Resident Theology, my blog of nine years that I maintained during Master’s and doctoral work).
2021 recap: reading
Ten years ago I cracked 150 books in a year; ever since, it’s been around 100 annually, give or take a few in either direction. Heading into 2021 I wanted to up that number—which felt just stuck—as much as I could. I met my minimum goal (I’m currently sitting at 120), along with some of my strategic goals, but I’m hoping to crawl back to 150 in 2022.
2021 recap: writing
This past year was a big one for me, writing-wise. I published my first book, wrote about a dozen essays, curated a book forum in an academic journal, and got published for the first time in three of my favorite magazines. Here’s a quick rundown.
“The latest scholarship”
One often hears folks in biblical studies refer to “the latest scholarship” on such-and-such topic. Or they will refer to author X or book Y being “out of date.” Or when writing a scholar will refer to “the latest studies” or “the most recent research.” I’ve poked fun at this tendency before. A few years back I penned “An honest preface to contemporary academic interpretation of the New Testament.”
A taxonomy of academic vocations
A couple weeks back I wrote more than 12,000 words on the experience of teaching a 4/4 load as a professor while also trying to publish (and, if possible, live an ordinary life). Consider this post a coda to that four-part series. Spending five years at Yale for my PhD was, in numberless ways, a blessing. But one of the few ways in which it was not was in its formation of my (and presumably others’) sense of what it means to inhabit the academy.
“The slow death of the Protestant churches”
Fifteen years ago, in a journal article on Karl Barth’s christology and Chalcedonian doctrine (among other things), Bruce McCormack concluded his article with the following paragraph (my emphasis): It remains only to say a word about the situation—and the motives which have led me to elaborate precisely this form of Christology in the present moment. The situation in which Christian theology is done in the United States today is shaped most dramatically by the slow death of the Protestant churches.
Deconstruction
My post on Thursday generated a lot of responses, many of which were positive. One mostly mild but nevertheless negative reaction was a defense of the concept of deconstruction, seeing in my post an unfair diminishment of what for many has proven to be both a necessary and a healthy process of growth in faith and repudiation of false or destructing teaching.
(Re)construction
There’s a lot of talk these days about deconstruction. I’m often asked how I approach deconstructing my students’ beliefs in the classroom; it’s typically a given not only that I do it but that I ought to do it, that it’s part of my job description. I do not deconstruct what my students come into my class believing. I don’t as a point of fact and I don’t on principle. Why?
A church in tatters
In my review of Rodney Clapp’s new book on neoliberalism a few months back, I write the following: Clapp sometimes partakes of a certain Hauerwasian grammar, whereby the indicative is used to describe what the church ought to be but is not (yet). Call it the eschatological indicative. Such language can function prophetically, calling the church to enact its baptismal and pentecostal identity, whatever its past or present failings. But it can also mystify the facts on the ground. Those facts are plainly put: The American church is in tatters. Our witness is shredded, our integrity a joke, our children bereft of a heritage and leaving the faith in droves.
Teaching a 4/4: freedom
This is the fourth and final post in a series of reflections on what it means to be a scholar in the academy with a 4/4 teaching load. The first discussed the allotment of one’s hours in a 4/4 load; the second compared apples and oranges in terms of institutional contexts (i.e., the material and structural differences between the Ivy League and teaching colleges, as well as between partnered parents and single persons without children); the third offered a series of tips and strategies for 4/4 profs who want to make, foster, and protect the time necessary for reading and writing. This fourth and last post is a companion to the third, discussing in broader terms some of the gifts and opportunities afforded by serving at a teaching-heavy university.
Teaching a 4/4: publishing
This post is the third in a short series on what it’s like to teach a 4/4 load as a university professor and, conditions permitting, how to flourish while doing so. I’ve laid out the allotment of office and home hours given to work for the usual 4/4 prof (tl;dr: 50-60 hours, typically, just to prep, teach, grade, mentor, sponsor, serve on committees, and reply to emails); I’ve explained why there are inevitable tradeoffs involved, both at the personal and familial and at the institutional level. For many 4/4 teachers, scholarship is next to impossible without transgressing what ought to be a hard and fast division between work life and home life.
Teaching a 4/4: tradeoffs
In the last post I laid out what a typical work week looks like in terms of one’s allotment of hours when teaching a 4/4 load at a university. In this post I want to compare that to institutional contexts on the other end of the spectrum. Such a comparison shows rather straightforwardly what sort of tradeoffs are involved, from an institutional perspective, when professors are asked to teach more or fewer courses; in this case, tradeoffs concerning quantity and quality of publication.
Teaching a 4/4: office hours
When I was at Yale and friends were on the job market, every single person I knew considered a 4/4 teaching load—that is, four classes per semester, for a total of eight per academic year—to be a fate worse than death. In fact, most people I knew considered a 3/3 the outer limit of possible professorial sanity, but in itself still an unacceptably punishing load. Since I didn’t even know what a 4/4 was before being informed of its unmitigated misery, I simply assumed they were right.
Lightspeed politics
I’m just about finished listening to the audiobook version of Charles C. W. Cooke’s 2015 book The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right’s Future. Cooke is a writer and editor for National Review who leans libertarian. Like all his writing, the book is lucid, witty, substantive, and focused in earnest on what matters most. I’m not a libertarian, and I think Cooke is wrong in significant respects, but I regularly read him both for instruction and for pleasure—and, occasionally, to listen to the most eloquent representative of views I oppose.
Advent
A blessed Advent to y’all. Last year I wrote a reflection for the first Sunday in Advent at Mere Orthodoxy titled “The Face of God.” Here’s a sample: Advent is the season when the church remembers—which is to say, is reminded by the Spirit—that as the people of the Messiah, we are defined not by possession but by dispossession, not by having but by hoping, not by leisurely resting but by eagerly waiting.