Marginal Christianity

From one of Bonhoeffer’s underground seminary students: “Twice [Bonhoeffer] quoted to them the words: ‘One man asks: What is to come? The other: What is right? And that,’ ” said Bonhoeffer, “ ‘is the difference between the free man and the slave.’ ” What do you think Bonhoeffer means? What does it mean for you?

From Karl Barth we need to learn anew that it is God speaking to us in Holy Scripture’s witness to Jesus Christ in the power of the Spirit. From Dietrich Bonhoeffer we must learn that Christendom is over, to perpetuate it is folly, that is, unfaithfulness based on fear and lack of discernment), church must be rediscovered in the local, in the last and the least, and in the double immersion in the daily life of the world and the   life of Jesus to discern the will and way of God among us re recommends in his Letters and Papers from Prison. From Michel de Certeau that the task of the church is to establish boundaries and create a space, a home for its members and at the same time transgress those boundaries in openness and welcome to those outside. From Rene Girard that desire, disorded desire, mimicking what God and others do, have, and are generate the violence that corrodes and degrades all of us and our world. From the Liberation theologians that God exercises ...

Jordan Peterson wants to help men reclaim their masculinity and lead successful productive lives in a world where chaos and disorder reign making it particularly hard on men to be all they can and must, for the health of society, be. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre sagely observes that one cannot know how to live if one does not know the story of which he or she is a part. Peterson, therefore, calls men to embrace a different story than the one(s) currently dominating North America. The response he has generated shows he has struck a nerve for many more than a few people. He’s found a live and important concern – we are living by a false story about who we are and what we are to be about in the world. The itch he scratches is palpable, perennial, and profound. -Palpable because it involves how we actually live, our interface with the world, the quality of our relationships, and the character of our influence on others. It matters . -Perennial because it never goes away, is ...

By Andrew Sullivan Earlier this week, I went to a lecture given by Steven Pinker on his latest book, Enlightenment Now . I’m a huge and longtime fan of Pinker’s, and his book The Blank Slate was, for me, a revelation. He’s become a deep and important critic of the visceral hostility to nature and science now so sadly prevalent on the left and right, a defender of reason and the Enlightenment against the “social justice” movements on campus, and his new book is a near-relentless defense of modernity. I sat there for an hour slowly being buried in a fast-accumulating snowdrift of irrefutable statistics showing human progress: the decline of violence and war, the rise and rise of democracy, the astonishing gains against poverty of the last couple of decades, the rise of tolerance and erosion of cruelty, lengthening lifespans, revolutions in health, huge increases in safety, and on and on. It was one emphatic graph after another that bludgeoned my current depression into a kind of ...

Freedom. Our holiest word as Americans. Unfortunately, like other holy words, this one has been debased. Biblically, freedom is double-edged. Freedom from whatever hinders or constrains us from doing what we should and freedom for doing that which we should. By the time we reach America that notion of freedom was in the process of thinning out. The freedom for -aspect was fading as modernity pushed us to an ever-greater individualism and an early communitarianism faded. In our time, freedom seems to mean freedom from whatever hinders or constrains us from doing what we want and freedom for has morphed into freedom to do what we want. The transition from should to want marks the reduction to the one-dimensional view that reigns supreme and inviolable today: freedom from whatever hinders or constrains us from doing what we want. This is clear in the gun-debate. Those who oppose any restrictions on gun ownership are on the side of the angels – our attenuated version of freedom. ...

Rethinking Our Patriotism Gary Gutting THE STONE   FEB. 6, 2017 Continue reading the main story Share This Page Share Tweet Email More Save 226 Photo Credit Lucas Jackson/Reuters Although abstract logic and conceptual analysis are among philosophers’ primary tools, they must, as John Dewey emphasized, use these tools to “clarify the social and moral strife of their day.” In particular, surprising political events, like those currently unfolding on both sides of the Atlantic, can call for some serious rethinking. In my case, this has led me to reconsider my views about patriotism. In 2012, halfway through Barack Obama’s presidency, I wrote  a Fourth of July piece  trying to explain my patriotic feelings for this country. My focus was an apparent contradiction in the idea of patriotism as a moral virtue. Patriotism seemed to require a commitment to the good of this particular country, even when its good was at odds with the greater good o...

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...

Stations on the Way to Freedom Discipline If you set out to seek freedom, then you must learn above all things                                                                  discipline of your soul and your senses, lest your desires                                                                         ...

          We need to start at the beginning with a confession. We’re all liberals – conservatives, republicans, libertarians, democrats, tea partiers, et al. Different kinds of liberals to be sure. Out liberalism is shared at such a deep level that we think we’re really different. But not so much.           We are liberals because we have been nurtured by the western liberal tradition beginning with the Renaissance all the way to post-modernity or wherever we are today. And at the heart of this tradition is the notion freedom, individualistically conceived, with choice as its primary good.           The right and left (of whatever stripe) do disagree and argue with each other – a lot! But what they argue about is freedom of choice. Who gets it and who is being deprived of it. That’s what we primarily fight about. Some are mad at the 1% who e...

The Place of the Old Testament           As we embark on God’s response to humanity’s revolt against him we face the fact of the Old Testament. This sprawling, daunting, mystifying, complex story occupies the vast majority of the Christian Bible. That alone makes us ask “What’s going on in the Old Testament anyway?”           The church adopted the scriptures of the Hebrew Bible as their own and joined them to those documents that eventually became the New Testament to form it Bible. So what is the relation they discerned between these two sets of texts that made it possible and plausible to read them together? The church understood its existence as a part of the long story of what God had been doing in and for the world from creation onwards . However complicated and difficult it may be to understand that relation at points, the fact of the Christian Bible as Old and New Testaments ...