Theology
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The fact is that democracy requires not only the organization of political parties, but also a certain degree of mutual respect or at least tolerance. Whenever the followers of one political party persuade themselves that the future of the nation is not safe with the opposition in power, it becomes fairly certain that the nation’s Read more
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Jon D. Levenson’s Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence is one of the most stimulating theology books I’ve read in a long time. I was expecting something different–a theodicy of sorts; but what I got instead was more interesting. Levenson argues that key passages in the Tanakh/Jewish Bible present Read more
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Shamelessly plagiarized from my Goodreads page: Go Tell It On the Mountain, James Baldwin A vivid, searing exploration of religious, racial, sexual, and individual identity. An American classic. Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin A very different book from Go Tell It On the Mountain, but still occupied with the nature of the self, its desires, and Read more
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Over the past several decades Christians have been rethinking their relationship to Jews and Judaism. This has been prompted, most obviously, by the horrors of the Holocaust and the recognition that centuries of Christian anti-Judaism and persecution of Jews helped lay the groundwork for it. Most notably, both the Catholic Church and most mainline Protestant Read more
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I was only previously aware of Daniel C. Maguire as a theologian on the liberal end of Roman Catholicism. But it seems he now rejects belief in God altogether and has written a book called Christianity without God. I’m not interested in criticizing anyone for what they can or can’t believe. Atheism can be a Read more
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In his review of Bart Ehrman’s How Jesus Became God, Luke Timothy Johnson readily concedes that neither the empty-tomb stories nor the accounts of Jesus’ appearing to the disciples after his crucifixion prove–or could prove–the Christian confession that Jesus is divine. Rather, Johnson says, this confession was rooted in the early Christians’ experience of being Read more
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Reading 20th-century Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel’s important work God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism recently, I was struck by this passage: There are only three ways of judging the prophets: they told the truth, deliberately invented a tale, or were victims of an illusion. In other words, revelation is either a Read more
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I’m currently re-reading Scottish Anglican theologian John Macquarrie‘s marvelously lucid Principles of Christian Theology (first published in 1966; I’m reading the substantially revised version that was published about 10 years later). I first read it as an undergrad when my interest in existentialism was at its height. In the first part of the book, Macquarrie Read more
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In her book Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Origins of Anti-Semitism, Rosemary Radford Ruether argues that a key difference between Christianity and Judaism is that Christianity has been unwilling for much of its history to live with the tension of the unrealized messianic age. As a result, Christians have accused Jews of being blind to Read more
A Thinking Reed 