Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
If utopia is a perfect place or at least the best possible social arrangement, it must be a very dull place where any change is a change for worse and not for better, where nothing can be new and good at the same time. There can be no conflict in…
Christians, even those who say much about ‘incarnational’ faith, can say surprisingly little about the way that God claims our bodies . Perhaps this is most striking in treatments of baptism, where the intensely bodily character of the rite would especially seem to invite comment. Even if the term ‘baptism’…
Dear Pastor, I believe the locus of the difference between us is your statement here: "There are mothers who choose to risk their lives and even die to preserve the fetus, there are those who wouldn't. There are the circumstances of the individual, family, income, community, illness, risk factors, etc..…
New Year’s resolutions for weight loss are practically on the liturgical calendar of America. Somewhere around the beginning of a new year, people resolve that they will get in better shape. Some are made to feel guilty by the obesity police in our country (whose standards are, many times, very…
Click HERE for Part 1 After sending my letter to the local pastors, I received a long and thoughtful post from one of the local pastors, and it was sent not just to me, but to all of the pastors whom I e-mailed. Unfortunately, I do not feel I can…
Narrative and story have been all the rage in theology for the last few decades. The attractions are obvious. Narrative theologians favor the active, unpredictable, vibrant God of Scripture to the impersonal first principle of philosophical theology. Narrative theologians reject the notion that theologians need to justify their work by…
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Of all the people I’ve seen on film recently, the one I’d most want to be is David Berlinski, whom Ben Stein interviewed extensively in his Paris apartment that reeked with sophistication and culture. Berklinski, by his own definition a “secular Jew” with no memory of Hebrew, has just published…
In an intriguing piece in TNR , writer Cinque Henderson - who identifies himself as one of the few remaining Clinton supporters among African-Americans - explains Obama’s use of “hoodwinked” and “bamboozled” (not the first words to spring to Obama’s lips, one would think) in the South Carolina primary: “It…
Kristeva says that contemporary culture separates affects from language, which leads to a loss of soul. Souls are empty. To help, our culture offers drugs and entertainment. Drugs flatten experience to a drone; entertainment dazzles momentarily with two-dimensional images. So do our solutions increase the problem. Flat remedies for flat…
Kristeva’s distinction of semiotic and symbolic is intended to overcome the dualism of traditional linguistic theories, the dualism of body and language, or matter and language. For Kristeva, the “semiotic” is the way drives are organized or “discharged” in language, and thus includes everything that is meaningful in language but…
Julia Kristeva notes that Saussure’s linguistic theory permits “linguistics to claim a logical, mathematical formalization on the one hand, but on the other, it definitely prevents reducing a language or text to one law or one meaning.” This latter point is true because by splitting the sign into signified and…
Desmond thinks that dialectic makes some gains: It affirms the “complex sense of unity,” appreciates mediation, critiques dualism, defends the “interplay and community of immanence and transcendence.” But dialectic cannot be the final moment of metaphysics. Why? “The problem is that if we privilege self-mediation and erect this into the…
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