Category: Theology and Practice
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...
Quiet at Christmas
I watched the basketball game on mute, listening for sounds of life. The Cleveland Cavaliers looked listless in their Christmas Day matchup against the Golden State Warriors. The two teams were on clearly opposite paths: the Cavaliers, beset by internal...
Dementia and the God Who Remembers
Privation If evil is a privation of the good, as held by many in the history of Christian theology, that does not imply it is passive. An all too active force, evil might be akin to an insatiable blackhole, sweeping...
Advent IV: The Coming(s) of Christ and Our Hope
The Epistle to the Hebrews might not be the first place we turn for Advent readings. We hear nothing of Mary or a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes. In fact, Hebrews offers no reflections on the birth of Jesus and...
Advent III: Forget the Former Things
The incarnation is often seen as an unforeseen, unforeseeable miracle. Miraculous, certainly. But unforeseen? Only in the sense that the resolution of a detective story is unforeseen. Once we know whodunnit, all the clues click into place and we realize...
Advent II: Expectant Waiting
As 2020 has lingered on, I have watched as marker after marker of a year’s progression have been overtaken by an endless sea of sameness: one weekend blurs into the next, one Zoom call into the next. The rhythms of...
Searching for Other Feminisms: An Interview with Leah Libresco Sargeant
At the end of September, Judge Amy Coney Barrett was being considered for a Supreme Court vacancy left by the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote a piece considering the impact Coney Barrett might...
Roger Ebert’s Dying Words
I’ve recently had Clem Snide’s latest album, Forever Just Beyond (2020), on repeat. Snide, the nom de band of Jewish-American songwriter Eef Barzelay, collaborates on the album with Scott Avett of the Avett Brothers to produce an understated, folky contemplation...