Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Not long ago, I heard these statistics about New York City: New York City is in $100 billion in debt. 20% of all NYC residents are on food stamps, which cost $250 million a month. 5% of NYC population are on disability, costing $252 million a month. Other assistance costs…
1. All political power is ambivalent. Vertical violence of “the state” tends to limit horizontal and contested power between people and between tribes. “The State” brings new oppression, but also a measure of new peace and unity. 2. All political formations are ambiguous like this: a strong family conquers weaker…
Gnosticism by any other name would smell the same. But does the church have much of a theological sense of smell, these days, when it comes to the seductions of virtuality in our worshipping communities? Social isolation during a global pandemic makes good public health sense, but whether church should…
It is a remarkable thing, you know, this thing called priority. Just a few weeks ago, religious leaders were boldly asserting in their high-dollar online videos that it was too dangerous to return to worship and that we needed to listen to our political and health leaders. "They are the…
Somewhere in the city of Jerusalem on a rooftop just a few years after the ascension of Jesus and the outpouring of the Spirit on Pentecost. . . ". . . and just when are you guys going to live up to your ‘Sons of Thunder’ reputation? Huh? A lot…
In my book, Solomon Says: Directives for Young Men ( Amazon , Kindle ) I mention that Solomon portrays wisdom as a woman. But I don’t ask (or answer!) why he did so. Solomon uses the figure of Lady Wisdom without apology or explanation: Wisdom cries aloud in the street,…
Showing page 66 of 309
Showing page 13 of 43
Postmodern reading is characterized by a hermeneutics of suspicion, but in this postmodern critics are adopting a stance (sometimes quite consciously) rooted in Marxist and Freudian theory. Butler says, “in concentrating on the notion of hidden contradiction, many postmodernists allied themselves to two highly disputable, and certainly totalizing, 19th-century ideologies.”
Butler argues that “many postmodern ideas” are “at best confused, and at worst simply untrue.” But he’s pretty sanguine about that: “the essential leading ideas of many cultural epochs are open to the same criticism” - he mentions the Romantic notion of Imagination or the fascination with mesmerism in medical…
Butler points out that postmodernism’s claims that grand narratives are passe is very culturally specific, even parochial, and cannot be sustained as a sociological claim: “allegiances to large-scale, totalizing religious and naturalist beliefs are currently responsible for so much repression, violence, and war . . . . It is obvious…
After reviewing some of the more radical proposals for a postmodern historiography, Christopher Butler, no friend to postmodernism, makes the sensible suggestion that “Postmodern relativism needn’t mean that anything goes, or that faction and fiction are the same as history. What it does mean is that we should be more…
In his midrashic/lectionary treatment of Matthew, M. D. Goulder suggests that “The three fourteens are to a Jew who had read Daniel six weeks of generations; and if six, then looking forward to a seventh, to make a week of weeks . . . . This, then, is to be…
In his midrashic/lectionary treatment of Matthew, M. D. Goulder suggests that “The three fourteens are to a Jew who had read Daniel six weeks of generations; and if six, then looking forward to a seventh, to make a week of weeks . . . . This, then, is to be…
Showing page 1816 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
