Marginal Christianity

Brian Ross, FB 5.26.16 As a society, we often create our own problems, and then we fumble creating solutions. Why? Because of our faulty "faith" commitments. Many progressives assume that historical ethics and spiritual narratives are a danger to society. Human beings should be free to be anyone they want. Then, when evil happens, the answer becomes: legislate, legislate, legislate. Not realizing that their own narratives helped to grease the wheels towards evil. They have dismantled thick narratives of transcendence that serve as a check on human actions and motives. Similarly, many conservatives (who pay lip service to historical ethics and spiritual narratives) assume that any check on unfettered markets is quite ridiculous. Human beings, economically, should be free to do whatever they want. And to entice anyone they want to- with the widgets they have for sale. Then, when evil happens, the answer becomes to preach more and more about historical ethics a...

by C.C. Pecknold | November 29, 2012 One of our greatest living philosophers, Alasdair MacIntyre, recently gave a lecture at the University of Notre Dame titled “Catholic instead of what?”  MacIntyre always has a way of provoking thought, of unsettling our categories, and helping us to understand ourselves and our place in the world.  This brilliant lecture was no exception.  He began by observing that Catholics have always understood themselves in contrast to something else.  That is a particularly good starting point for any post-election analysis since Catholics have been increasingly reduced to a political caricature of what they are against (contraception, abortion, redefinition of marriage). MacIntyre stressed that Catholic Christians have always lived the Christian story in such a way as to unfold its communal learning before the whole world, largely in terms of affirmations an...

September 14, 2012 By Tony Jones Neal DeRoo, co-convener of a conference at which I am presenting a paper (which is sure to bring Peter Rollins to his academic knees), writes at Church and Pomo about what elicited this conference: “Culture” is an amorphous, vague thing that is next to impossible to pin-down. It is only slightly better than a child’s sense of “they”: “But mom, if I do that, they will laugh at me.” Similarly, Christians tend to make a lot of our decisions based on what “culture” will do: “This culture is going to hell in a hand basket and that’s why God is punishing it” or “We have to do this to keep the Church relevant to our culture.” Both the idea that the Church can avoid culture, can hide from it somehow, and the seemingly opposite idea that the Church must engage with culture share a common problem: in both cases, Christians assume a certain distance between the Church and this thing called ‘culture.’ But the Church is not distinct from culture. It is...