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Epistemology

Seeking Integration in a Fragmented World: Covenant Epistemology: The Integrative Regard of the Other

Fragmentation characterizes our era. Bits, bytes, chips, data points. Ourselves as reducible to the meaningless. We can feel dehumanized and lost. We seek wholeness, integration. We rightly believe that integration brings meaningfulness, somehow doing better credit to ourselves as humans and to the world. More than that, integration somehow aligns…

by Esther Lightcap MeekJune 5, 2018
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Proverbs

The Dramatic Structure of Proverbs

The book of Proverbs appears as a largely random collection of aphorisms drawn from experience saturated in law. Despite its random arrangement, however, the book does have an over-arching structure that reinforces its main themes. One way to gather clues regarding the structure of a biblical book (or any book)…

by Peter LeithartMay 31, 2018
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Baptism

Infant Baptism in the History of the Church

Ancient practice in the Church sets an important precedent for present day practice. This certainly doesn’t mean that Christians are bound to only do things as they have always been done, but the principles of catholicity and unity move us not to break from historic church practice on a particular…

by Timothy LeCroyMay 29, 2018
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Biblical Studies

Babel Academy, Part 2

For Part 1, click HERE . Genesis 1 describes the creation of the physical order. Genesis 2 recapitulates the pattern of Genesis 1 as it describes the creation of the social order. Genesis 3 describes the intended founding of an ethical order. It was here that sin entered into the…

by Mike BullMay 24, 2018
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Biblical Studies

Babel Academy, Part 1

The Business of Keeping the Saints in the Dark Let there be light! The first recorded “spoken” words of God. Curiously, even this creative decree was a deed whose fruit required an appraisal. God judged the light and separated it from the darkness. As the cardinal act within a newborn…

by Mike BullMay 22, 2018
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Course Announcement

A Week with Esther Meek - An Introduction to Covenant Epistemology

We are very pleased to announce that Esther Lightcap Meek will be the instructor for our 2018 Trinity Course in August. The course is titled "Loving to Know: Introducing Covenant Epistemology" and will be held August 13-17 at Beeson Divinity School. Esther Meek, Ph.D., is Professor of Philosophy at Geneva…

by TheopolisMay 21, 2018

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Civilizing Process

In a 1983 article in Past & Present , Lawrence Stone presented evidence that showed a precipitous drop in the homicide rate in England from the 14th to the 20th century. Why? Stone thinks that Elias’s Civilizing Process had something to do with it: “Yves Castan has shown with great…

March 30, 2013
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Critique of Violence

Critchley ( Philosophy and the Return of Violence: Studies from this Widening Gyre , 64- 8) gives a lucid analysis of Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” (in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings ), organized around Benjamin’s distinctions between law-making and law-preserving violence, between political and the general strike, and between…

March 30, 2013
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Zizek’s dreams

In his essay in Philosophy and the Return of Violence: Studies from this Widening Gyre , Simon Critchley describes Zizek’s Barlebyan politics in Shakespearean terms: “Zizek is, I think, a Slovenian Hamlet.” He “dreams of a divine violence, a cataclysmic, purifying violence of the sovereign ethical deed,” but is left…

March 30, 2013
Politics

Shades of Grey

At the end of his massively documented The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade , Andrew Feinstein notes the blurring of lines between formal and informal arms markets, the black and the white markets that merge into gray: “While the large defence contractors like BAE and Lockheed Martin -…

March 29, 2013
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Permanent War Economy

Back in 1944, Walter Oakes predicted Marxianly that late capitalism would naturally develop a “permanent war economy.” Defining a war economy as one where “the government’s expenditures for war . . . become a legitimate and significant end-purpose of economic activity.” Capitalism, Oakes claimed, seeks equilibrium that reduces unemployment and…

March 29, 2013
Politics

Not Bees

Some political theorists have thought that we can live like bees - sociable without command, law, speech, punishments. Hobbes demurs ( Hobbes: Leviathan , II.17). And not because we are superior to bees. We can’t live like bees because we are “continually in competition for honour and Dignity” and thus…

March 29, 2013

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