Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I grew up in the 1950s. This was before the "Sixties" and the democratization, informalization, and general cheapening of the church and her worship. Ministers were Father Donovan, Pastor Eckhart, Reverend MacPherson, Mister (Episcopal) Parker, and Brother Smith. Liturgical speech was high language, sounding kind of like the King James…
Metaphor exerts a surprisingly powerful influence within our thinking. Although it is easily dismissed as little more than a figure of speech, when we attend more closely to the ways in which we use it, metaphor’s importance swiftly becomes more apparent. Although many of our metaphors have become quite invisible…
What is a tree, scientifically speaking? A mere googling gives the following answer: “a woody perennial plant, typically having a single stem or trunk growing to a considerable height and bearing lateral branches at some distance from the ground.” We can increase detail by describing its family, genus, species and…
The majority of Western evangelical Christians rarely, if ever, fast as a form of spiritual discipline. In our culture, fasting is more connected with dieting than worship, the other side of our deeply ambiguous fascination with food. Food is everywhere. We eat more than ever before, at greater speed, and…
A Grammar of Creation An understanding of the visual-musical language of the Bible must begin with Genesis 1. This is fortunate, because when explaining biblical types to academics, as opposed to children, one is repeatedly forced to start from scratch. From birth, a healthy child is attuned to rhythm and…
In an inverse Eden, a land laid waste, one works alone tending the trash. There are none like him in all the earth, inquisitive, playful and most drawn to those mysterious, dancing bipedal creatures who lost earth and left it to go wandering the vast wilderness of space. Humans have…
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James Smith’s conclusions regarding Derrida express more clearly than I’ve been able to do my own sense of Derrida. These are scattered quotations from The Fall of Interpretation , pp. 127-129: “Derrida is honest about not challenging for a moment Rousseau’s and Levi-Strauss’s reading of violence; his own analysis is…
James K. A. Smith has a neat scheme for summarizing different view of interpretation in terms of the categories of creation and fall. For some thinkers, interpretation and the possibility of misinterpretation are results of the Fall; for others, interpretation and misinterpretation is inherent in created life, though there is…
Another benefit of Derrida: Because he puts philosophical issues in mythological and metaphorical terms, he moves philosophy into the field of theology. As I’ve pointed out in a number of posts, Derrida (following Plato) speaks of the relationship between speaker and speech (or sometimes between speech and writing) as a…
JP Vernant points out the connection between writing and democratization: “In the kingdoms of the New East, writing was a privilege and specialty of scribes. Writing enabled the royal administration to control the economic and social life of the State by keeping records of it. Its purpose was to constitute…
Well, here’s an interesting coincidence (pointed to by Derrida, still in “Plato’s Pharmacy”): Derrida is discussing the ritual of the pharmakos , which he is connecting to Plato’s various uses of pharmak - words in discussions of knowledge, language, and other issues. The pharmakos rite was a scapegoat ritual, annually…
What is it that makes Derrida so stimulating and fun to read? At least for his treatment of standard philosophical works (I’m reading “Plato’s Pharmacy” in Disseminations ), I think it’s mainly that he shows that philosophy is not about what undergraduate courses in philosophy teach you it is about.…
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