Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Inspired by the “Moscow Mood” Debate In a shocking 1961 study, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram would don an official-looking white lab coat and tell a volunteer to administer increasing shocks to another “volunteer” in an adjacent room strapped into an “electric chair” just out of sight. The shocks were incrementally…
My title and the substance of the article are borrowed from a section of David Wenham’s excellent book, Paul: Follower of Jesus or Founder of Christianity? I am appropriating ideas from the pages in his book which address the question, “Why Does Paul refer to Jesus’ Life and Ministry so…
Some of us may be familiar with the notion that the epistle of James is like a New Testament version of Proverbs or other wisdom literature. According to this line of thinking, the epistle of James (together with the other wisdom literature) is basically a collection of timeless sayings without…
This summer I started walking a long trail that ran north from our home. On my best days, I would walk a total of five miles at a brisk pace. This trail follows the power lines that serve a significant portion of North Dallas and stretches far past the two…
I am an Australian. I went to the American Academy of Religion mega-fest last year to meet up with some friends, to present a paper at a ‘science and religion’ panel, and to marvel at the sheer scale of how Americans do things. It was quite a ride. Looking at…
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 We evangelicals do not often understand the roles of men and women in ministry. Because our consumerist culture has gutted the notion of family as it was historically understood, all Biblical passages about women in church ministry (a familial organism) are almost incomprehensible to…
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Consumerism is a popular category of analysis, but what exactly does it mean? How is consumerism or the consumer society different from anything else? Haven’t every economies had producers and consumers? In his The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism , Colin Campbell offers this description of consumerism:…
Bohemians, Featherstone suggests, were the first “true artistic proletariat,” living next to lower class people in low-rent areas of the larger cities, and imitating the lifestyle of the lower classes: “They cultivated similar manners, valuing spontaneity, an anti-systematic work ethos, and a lack of attention to the sense of ordered…
Featherstone isolates three aspects of the postmodern aestheticization of daily life: 1) Artistic movements such as Dada and Surrealism attempt to break down the boundary between art and daily life by turning toilets and such into art objects. This is both an attempt to “dissemble [art’s] sacred halo and challenge…
In a lecture on Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Ian Johnston makes this helpful distinction between existentialist drama and the Theater of the Absurd. “In the Theatre of the Absurd the protagonists are discovered in a world which they do not, indeed they cannot, understand. It has no…
Modernity attempts to spatialize time, and to chart temporally shifting reality in a fixed mathesis. So argues Catherine Pickstock at least. But in this sense postmodernism is hypermodernism. Featherstone notes that MTV “seems to exist in a timeless present with video artists ransacking film genres and art movements from different…
Mike Featherstone, expounding on the “aestheticitization of everyday life” that he claims is characteristic of the postmodern ethos, notes that similar motifs are evident in the early development of the fashion industry: “The intensified place of fashion increases our time-consciousness, and our simultaneous pleasure in newness and oldness gives us…
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