theology 16
Medicine Wheel for the Planet: A Review
There ought not be unnecessary opposition between Indigenous and Christian perspectives. The creative work of caring for our ecology is hard enough; let us not also misunderstand one another.
No Good without Evil: G.W. Leibniz’s Reconciliation of Animal Suffering with God
A robin or chicken that seems to die in a totally senseless way is viewed by humans only in its individuality, without seeing the universal order underlying this suffering.
Craft and Theology: The Renaissance
It almost feels heretical to say that at the center of our religion, indeed our existence, is a God that can be wounded and broken, but this is precisely the…
“The Place of Man Within the Whole”: A (Brief) Theology of Hunting
We’ve recently started the annual tradition (three years going strong!) of holding a wild game dinner with our friends and church community. Each family brings a dish harvested from the…
Batter My Heart Three-Person’d God–Break, Blow, Burn, and Make New: Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer Re-Members the Poetic as an Opportunity to Consider Redemption
Oppenheimer replies to him “Why I chose the name is not clear, but I know what thoughts were in my mind. There is a poem of John Donne, written just…
Perseverance and Grace: Or, Why I Don’t Deserve a Damn Bit of Credit for my Life
I’ve found that in perplexing or challenging circumstances, “why?” is a boring question. We like why. The leadership guru Simon Sinek asks us to start with why. It’s a popular…
Ecological Curiosity for Faithful Feeling of Place: Mountain Nature and Strangers in High Places
So too does my eye for the Creator veiled and present in His evidence. Without them, how could I recognize what was first and larger in what I sense of…
Agrarian Theology and its Limits: A Review of Agrarian Spirit
I am not faulting Wirzba for failing to include these examples of more conservative Christians who practice agrarianism. But I would ask whether his theology of agrarianism, written in an…
Two Cheers for Sacramentality
I give two cheers for Mark Clavier’s timely and eternal reminder to us that we should seek the encounter with God in the world; it may just give us a…
Imagining Divine Participation
No matter how fallen or distant from God the world around us may seem, the distance is never absolute.
Picturing Home
Cultivate. Give order. Name. Attend. Reveal. Craft a parable. Homestead. Welcome. In Placemaking and the Arts: Cultivating the Christian Life (IVP Academic, 2018), Jennifer Allen Craft offers these paradigms and…
The Monkey in the Margin: History, Tradition, and Transgression
[T]he early scholastic notion of revelation was more dynamic than the modern one. Revelation does not occur, in the medieval understanding, once and for all in the static letters of…
Absurd Wisdom: An Apology for Euthyphro
“Not many of you are wise, as men account wisdom…God chose those whom the world considers absurd to shame the wise.” (1 Cor. 1:26-27) The Philosopher and the Theologian The…
The Local Bonhoeffer
Dietrich Bonhoeffer stands at the fore of figures of the Christian past who loom large over political theology and religious activism today. The German pastor and theologian’s life elevates his…
Bob Dylan and Christian Zionism
CounterPunch has published my article on one aspect of Dylan’s foreign policy: his view of the modern state of Israel. It touches on the theology of dispensational premillennialism. Our book…
The Rationality of the Doctrine of Creation
Mt. Airy, Philadelphia. This is not an argument for intelligent design. It is, however, an argument that creation is the only scientifically acceptable explanation for the existence of the universe.…