Resident Theologian
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Deflating tech catastrophism
There’s no better way to deflate my proclivities for catastrophism—a lifelong project of my long-suffering wife—than writers I respect appealing to authorities like St. Augustine and Wendell Berry. And that’s just what my friends Jeff Bilbro and Alan Jacobs have done in two pieces this week responding to my despairing reflections on digital technology, prompted by Andy Crouch’s wonderful new book, The Life We’re Looking For.
“X is not in the Bible”
In an annual course I teach on moral philosophy I assign a textbook that contains a chapter on X. The author of the textbook is an ethicist, and the ethics he seeks to present to his readers (imagined as college students) is general or universal ethics; though he doesn’t out himself as a Kantian, those with ears to hear spy it from the opening pages. In the chapter on X the author has a sidebar dedicated to religious, by which he means Christian, arguments about X.
Personal tech update
It’s been an unplanned, unofficial Tech Week here at the blog. I’ve been meaning to write a mini-update on my tech use—continuing previous reflections like these—so now seems as good a time as any.
Tech for normies
On Monday The New Atlantis published my review essay of Andy Crouch’s new book, The Life We’re Looking For. The next day I wrote up a longish blog post responding to my friend Jeff Bilbro’s comment about the review, which saw a discrepancy between some of the critical questions I closed the essay with and an essay I wrote last year on Wendell Berry. Yesterday I wrote a seemingly unrelated post about the difference between radical churches (urban monastics, intentional communities, house churches, all to varying degrees partaking of the Hauerwasian or Yoderian style of ecclesiology) and what I called “church for normies.”
Church for normies
In his book Hauerwas: A (Very) Critical Introduction, Nicholas Healy raises an objection with Hauerwas’s ecclesiology. He argues that Hauerwas’s rhetoric and sometimes his arguments present the reader with a church fit only for faithful Christians—that is, for heroes and saints, for super-disciples, for the extraordinarily obedient, the successful, the satisfactory. By contrast, Healy argues that the church ought to be a home and a haven for “unsatisfactory Christians,” and that our doctrine of the church ought to reflect that.
Tech-wise BenOp
My friend Jeff Bilbro has raised a question about my review essay in The New Atlantis of Andy Crouch’s new book, The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World. He sees a real tension between the critical questions I pose for Crouch at the end of the review and my essay last year for The Point, in which I defend Wendell Berry against the charge of quietism or apolitical inaction (lodged, in this case, by critic George Scialabba).
Creatura verbi divini
On the Mere Fi podcast earlier this week, both Derek and Alastair pressed me on the question of whether the church is “the creature of God’s Word.” The theological worry here is that if one affirms, with catholic tradition, that the church creates the canon, then the proper order between the two has been inverted, since the people of God is the creatura verbi divini, not the other way around. How, after all, could it be otherwise?
Inoculation
Over the last year I’ve noticed something of a theme emerging on this blog. The theme is what people, especially Christians, and most of all well-educated Christians, feel permitted or pressured to believe (or not). I think a good deal of my experience of this phenomenon is a function of having lived for eight years outside of Texas or even the Bible belt—three years in Atlanta (technically the South but not exactly a small rural town in Louisiana) then five years in New Haven, Connecticut.
The uses of conservatism
In the Wall Street Journal a couple weeks back Barton Swaim wrote a thoughtful review of two new books on political conservatism, one by Yoram Hazony and one by Matthew Continetti. The first is an argument for recovering what conservatism ought to be; the second, a history of what American conservatism has in fact been across the last century.
“As we all know”
I have a friend who once told me of a professor he had in seminary. She instructed the class at the outset of the semester that, when they wrote their papers, she wanted them to imagine her peering over their shoulder. At every sentence featuring a claim, an assertion, or an assumption, they should imagine her asking them, “How do you know that?”
Webinar: God’s Living Word
Earlier this week I was honored to participate in a live webinar hosted by the Siburt Institute for Church Ministry, which is a part of the College of Biblical Studies here at ACU. The webinar was in a series called Intersection; the topic was Scripture, using my book published last year as a point of departure. The conversation was hosted by Carson Reed and Randy Harris and lasted about an hour. It was a pleasure to participate. I’ve embedded the video below, but you can also find it here and here. Enjoy.
The vanity of theologians
The love of God in Christ is the model of all good theological work. That is Barth's basic thesis: “If the object of theological knowledge is Jesus Christ and, in him, perfect love, then Agape alone can be the dominant and formative prototype and principle of theology.” Yet who among us would claim to consistently meet this standard? It is one thing to agree that teaching ought to be an act of self-emptying love on behalf of students, but quite another to teach that way.
Four loves follow-up
A brief follow-up to the last post about the state of the four loves in the youngest generations today.
Four loves loss
More than sixty year ago C. S. Lewis wrote a book called The Four Loves. Ever since, his framework has proven a reliable and popular paradigm for thinking about different aspects or modes of love. The terms he uses are storge, eros, philia, and agape; we might loosely translate these as kinship, romance, friendship, and self-giving to and for the other. They denote the love that obtains between members of a family, between spouses in a marriage, between close friends, and between humans and God.
I’m in Comment on ed tech
This morning Comment published my review essay of Audrey Watters’ latest book Teaching Machines. The title of the essay is “Unlearning Machines.”
I’m in CT on the conquest
I’m in Christianity Today with a review of Charlie Trimm’s new book, The Destruction of the Canaanites: God, Genocide, and Biblical Interpretation.
Six months without podcasts
Last September I wrote a half-serious, half-tongue-in-cheek post called “Quit Podcasts.” There I followed my friend Matt Anderson’s recommendation to “Quit Netflix” with the even more unpopular suggestion to quit listening to podcasts. As I say in the post, the suggestion was two-thirds troll, one-third sincere. That is, I was doing some public teasing, poking the bear of everyone’s absolutely earnest obsession with listening to The Best Podcasts all day every day.