Marginal Christianity

12. Resurrection. Everything Christian comes down to this. Everything. Minus the bodily resurrection Christianity is either a moralistic religion or a gnostic-trending philosophy or spirituality. And before we can talk about meaning we have to talk about reality. Theologian Karl Barth once admonished his friend and student Thomas F. Torrance, “ Wohlverstanden , leibliche Auferstehung” (“Mark well, bodily resurrection”).      A. John Updike gives a writer’s take in his well-known poem “Seven Stanzas at Easter” : “Make no mistake: if he rose at all                                                                      It was as...

by S.D. Kelly May 29, 2015   I t’s been a rough couple of weeks in the world of Reality TV. Bethenny Frankel is back on the Real Housewives of New York , inciting botox-compromising levels of rage in her fellow housewives. She even has a hashtag touting her return: #theBisback. Yes. Yes, she is. And Fox cancelled American Idol after 14 seasons, which, in Reality TV years, makes the show a million years old. In its way, this is sobering news, like hearing that the fossilized remains of your favorite museum dinosaur finally disintegrated, unable to endure the harsh light of the 21st century. Most dramatically, the Duggar family fiasco has come to light — in which it was revealed that the now-grown oldest son, Josh Duggar, was guilty of molesting several girls when he was fourteen. This led TLC to pull 1 9 Kids and Counting , finally bringing to a halt the Duggar-franchise juggernaut. Something was bound to go wrong with 19 Ki...