A new frontier

H/T: Blake

Read Full Post »

Grad school premonition?

I’m not normally one to get taken in by fortune cookies, with their vague predictions of happiness, but earlier today I had a rather strange experience. I had been having one of those “I’m sure I will get rejected by all programs” day, but the cafeteria had Chinese food, and thus, fortune cookies. The cookie [...]

Read Full Post »

In honor of Woland

Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita has quickly become one of my favorite novels. In addition to the incredible Satan character, we have Behemoth the cat, who is definitely the most amusing character I’ve read in Western literature.

Read Full Post »

Anatheism – Part 2: Bracketing belief, and the transcendence beneath us

Summary: In the second part of the book, Kearney turns first to a group of philosophers and then to a collection of modern novelists in an attempt to sketch out a ‘sacramental imagination.’ At the start of chapter 4, Kearney writes that there are three elements of anatheism: protest, prophecy, and sacrament. In showing the [...]

Read Full Post »

Reading/grad school update

In the interests of accountability, I’m going to try to recall my reading habits and accomplishes from the break, now that I’m at the end of the first week of classes. I will compare this to the plans I made back in December. First, a quick update on grad school, since I’ve just returned from [...]

Read Full Post »

The Haiti situation

I don’t have words. I can’t stomach talking about the reaction from various Antichrist places, such as the TBN. This is simply a link post to pass along a good historical perspective from Peter Hallward, as well as a link to a charity that Hallward commends as having very little overhead. Peter Hallward, “Our Role [...]

Read Full Post »

McCarraher on the 2000s, among other things

I had intended to put together the summary/response to part two of Anatheism tonight, but didn’t make the time. Instead, I happened upon this Eugene McCarraher interview that touches on several of the themes that the Davis and Haley essay gets at, especially regarding the intellectual and moral poverty of the evangelical Right as well [...]

Read Full Post »

American evangelicalism and politics

Both A.J. and Jeremy have written a few recent posts on the topic of evangelicalism and fundamentalism. In the various discussions, one point that has been raised (by me) is the ambiguity between the terms, and to what extent it’s fair to say that all evangelicals are fundamentalists. Further, one question that I had not [...]

Read Full Post »

Anatheism – Part 1: Seeing and responding to the strange

Summary: As we’ve discussed in the introduction, Kearney’s concern with anatheism seems to be the opening of a liminal space as a kind of portal to experience the divine. Accordingly, Kearney opens the first chapter of part 1, “In the Moment,” with a consideration of encounters with a divine stranger. In this chapter, he uses [...]

Read Full Post »

Anatheism – Preface and Introduction: Clearing space

This is the first post of four that considers Richard Kearney’s new book Anatheism: Returning to God After God. More information about the book can be found on the Columbia University Press site here, and interested readers may also want to check out Kearney’s recent article, “Sacramental Imagination: Eucharists of the Ordinary Universe” in the [...]

Read Full Post »