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Party spirit
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…
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The survival of chaos after the victory of God
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…
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Some recent reading
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…
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Should Jews view Christianity as a new revelation?
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…
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What’s the appeal of Christianity without God?
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…
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Why early Christians confessed Jesus as divine
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…
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What happens when we pray the Psalms?
According to Walter Brueggemann, in his essay “The Counter-World of the Psalms,”* the Psalms mediate to us a “counter-world” that subverts our “closely held world”–that is, the narrative or worldview we commonly live by. What is this “closely held” world like? For Brueggemann, it is a picture of the world characterized by anxiety and scarcity,…
