The Double Entendre of African-American Music: A Lesson for the Church
Music has undergone serious theological neglect according to Jeremy Begbie, a professionally trained musician and theologian at Duke Divinity School. In his introduction to Theology, Music and Time, he writes: In the twentieth century, the corridors of theology were not...
Why We Need the Dark
Jesus taught that “people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil” (John 3:19). As an anthropological and ethical statement, this is unequivocally true. But do we need physical darkness? In a National Geographic article entitled...
Time Poverty and the Sabbath
We all struggle with rest. The paradox of modernity, according to theologian Colin Gunton, is that “a world dedicated to the pursuit of leisure and of machines that save labour is chiefly marked by its levels of rush, frenetic busyness...
Crazy Ivar: Walking Gently on the Earth
A Meditation on Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! Shortly after the death of Nebraska pioneer John Bergson, his children––Alexandra, Lou, Oscar, and Emil––go on a “pleasure excursion” to buy a hammock from Crazy Ivar, who obtained the name from his hermetic...
“Her eyes drank in the breadth of it”: a phenomenology of receiving the land
Here I am again at the writer’s desk with a tall glass of lemonade, ready to analyze two passages that invoke “the Genius” of the land in Willa Cather’s novel O Pioneers! In the first passage, we witness the retrospective...
The Conundrum of Modern Art: Complexity versus Complicatedness
Terry Teachout, the drama critic for The Wall Street Journal, wrote a fascinating article that was buried in the weekend edition of the June 26th newspaper, “Too Complicated for Words: Are our brains big enough to untangle modern art?” Here...
The Genius of the Land
In my first post on O Pioneers! I mistakenly drew a historical contrast between the modern project of “marking on the land” and a postmodern project of “being marked by the land.” This contrast is too neat and tidy. As...
BOOK REVIEW: Francis S. Collins (editor), Belief: Reasons on the Reason for Faith
Belief: Readings on the Reason for Faith Edited by Francis S. Collins HarperOne, 2010 352 pp., $19.99 What kind of flowers does Francis S. Collins—one of the world’s leading geneticists—gather? His new anthology, modestly entitled Belief, answers this bizarre question....
Should the homosexual person elicit disgust or rejoicing?
I contend that projective disgust plays no proper role in arguing for legal regulation, because of the emotion’s normative irrationality and its connection to stigma and hierarchy. ––Martha Nussbaum, From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law I’ve been...
On my two unforgivable sins
Mr. Anderson got the last laugh as he departed the country, exposing my two unforgivable sins: a sympathy with postmodernism and an education at Wheaton College. Regarding the first sin, I confess to being a shameless “pomo” and insist that...