Month: January 2021
Book Review: History and Eschatology by N. T. Wright
History and Eschatology is a dense but rewarding book based on NT Wright’s Gifford Lectures, in which Wright is attempting to redirect natural theology, bringing history and biblical exegesis to the questions of natural theology to see if that “might...
Book Review: Sanctifying Interpretation by Chris E. W. Green
“God does not save us from interpretation but by it and for it.”[1] So claims Chris Green in the second edition of his marvelous book Sanctifying Interpretation: Vocation, Holiness, and Scripture. (Those familiar with the first edition of his book...
A Tale of Two Churches
I. Hamburg In 2019 I found myself working in Hamburg, Germany during the city’s celebration of a popular local holiday: Reformationstag, or Reformation Day.
Dignity Beyond Accomplishment
“The examination combines the techniques of an observing hierarchy and those of a normalizing judgment. It is a normalizing gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to quantify, to classify, and to punish. It establishes over others a visibility through...
The Insurrection of January Sixth
For the first episode of 2021, Matt, Derek, and Alastair apply their expertise and experience to thinking theologically about the pro-Trump protest that turned into an attack on the U.S. Capitol. Is this the fruit of ejecting God from our...
Catholicism in the Swamp: A Response to Brandon McGinley’s “The Prodigal Church”
Ed. note: This is the third and final response in our symposium on Brandon McGinley’s book The Prodigal Church. The American landscape has been a fertile seedbed historically for a very specific sort of Christianity. Methodism and Baptist expressions of the...
Defining “White Evangelical Crap”
One of the comments I got in response to Monday’s post was a fairly simple question: “What exactly do you have in mind when you talk about ‘white evangelical crap?'” It’s a fair question. So here’s an attempt at an...
Engagement Without Fear: Responding to Brandon McGinley’s “The Prodigal Church”
To anyone paying attention to church participation in North America over the last forty years, things are not now, nor have they been, very good. The jeremiads have been spoken, the eulogies written, and the post-mortem begun, while the patient...
Authenticity and Prodigality: Response to Brandon McGinley’s “The Prodigal Church”
Ed. Note: This is the first response of three we will be publishing as part of a brief symposium on Brandon McGinley’s book The Prodigal Church. One of the ways that Catholics tell the story of modernity—think for instance of Charles...
After Evangelicalism
Recently I was talking with a dear friend about how the gift that our particular collegiate experience gave us could be summarized this way: It made it possible for us to disentangle “Christianity” from “stupid American evangelical crap.”