In Overcoming Onto-Theology, Merold Westphal begins by urging a hermeneutic of suspicion. To which I cheerfully reply, “Okay! When can we start?” In this book he is addressing his postmodern friends who don’t share his faith, and his Christian friends who “are allergic or even a bit apoplectic when it comes to postmodern philosophy” (p. …
Outside My Heart?
Peter Leithart meant to be provocative in his Against Christianity, but the provocation is the “make you think” kind, and not the bomb-throwing kind. But when you tease out the ramifications of what he is saying, what you have on paper sure looks like it ought to be the bomb-throwing kind, but it still isn’t. …
Chocolat
“Neopaganism can be seen as the driving force behind the Oscar-nominated Chocolat (2001), written by Robert Nelson Jacobs from Joanne Harris’s novel. In this clever version of neopagan redemption, an entire French town is oppressed by the moral scruples of a patriarchal Roman Catholic mayor. The town is then scandalized by the arrival of a …
The Veil Sometimes Slips
“Herodias and Caiaphas could be defined as living allegories of the rite that is forced to return to its nonritual origins, the undisguised murder, by the power of the revelation that forces it out of its religious and cultural hiding places” (Girard, The Scapegoat, p. 140).
The P-38 Era
A brief glance around the blogosphere indicates that the word theonomy got people’s attention. Of course, it always did. Let me put the disclaimers in the first couple sentences so I can continue to kick this particular can down the road. No, this is not going to be done through politics. No, it is not …
Time and Gump Happen to Them All
“Forrest Gump (1994) and its predecessor Being There (1979) are both popular movies that communicate the idea of a chance world in which events occur without purpose. The use of mentally challenged men in both films is a metaphor for chance itself. They have no ‘intelligent design’ to their lives and yet both of them …
Can’t Help Returning
“Derived from skadzein, which means to limp, skandalon designates the obstacle that both attracts and repels at the same time. The initial encounter with the stumbling block is so fascinating that one must always return to it, and each return becomes more fascinating” (Girard, The Scapegoat, p. 132).
The Great Migraine of Modernity
Andrew Sandlin has prematurely welcomed me to the ranks of the Christian postmodernists. I am afraid he took my deal-busting adjective “theonomic” as something that would actually be welcomed in the ranks of those who are currently calling themselves Christian postmodernists, including one of the gentleman he cites. Of course it would never be accepted …
In Which I Continue Going Postal Modern
If every tribe is an interpretive community, and no tribe ever comes into contact with another one, then the problem does not arise. If there is only one tribe (as interpretive community), then the problem does not arise. But in the contemporary world (I had almost said modern world), all these tribes, interpretive communities, denominations, …
Subversiveness Is Bad?
“When a kid watches the animated movie Shrek, he probably doesn’t know about Carl Jung’s theories of psychological types and the collective unconscious, but he is ingesting them nonetheless through those characters and that story adapted after the Jungian model . . . The screenwriters admit Shrek’s Jungian ideas: ‘The book is very clever, because …