I am clearly on an authenticity jag, and so I must crave your pardon. Here I go some more. Nancy and I just got back from a brief road trip with some friends, in the course of which we spent some time in New Orleans and some of its environs. Two of the (really cool) …
Fake is not Real
The lust that our culture has for authenticity is so deep, and so unthinking, that it is the driving cause of our widespread acceptance of, and indeed insistence upon, sham authenticity. From factory-ripped jeans to locally-grown apples, and from them apples to politicians in photos with sleeves rolled up and jacket thrown carelessly over the …
A Really Funny Place
One of the things that mystifies and amuses me by turns is the tendency of contemporary Christians to believe that they are achieving a rare authenticity of soul, that they are presenting a prophetic countercultural vision to a watching world, that they are living out a genuine alternative lifestyle in line with the radical demands …
Superficial All the Way Down
I don’t know whether to file this under the “postmodernism” thread, or under “creation and food,” but that’s just the way it is in these postmodern times. Categories go fuzzy on you, and boundaries aren’t what they used to be. One of our great problems today is that Christians have gotten caught up in our …
That’s When
I have argued many times and in many ways that Christian postmoderns are posers. They are parasitic moderns, wanting the academic system to remain intact (so that their tenure will remain secure), wanting a John Stuart Mill secular state to remain intact (so that nobody has to confess Jesus in the public square), and so …
The Laugh Track of Unbelief
I prefer love over lies, peace over war, the taste of butterscotch over the taste of spinach, Christ over Baal, the straight over the crooked, the Navy over the Army, the Greeks over the Persians, the hills over the plains, two weeks of sunshine over two weeks of gray fog, feminine women over effeminate men, …
Chastised Constantinianism
At the beginning of James K.A. Smith’s book, Desiring the Kingdom, he has an extended conceit — that of comparing a trip to the mall as a worship experience — that works pretty well. I’d like to extend that conceit a step farther, and take it in a direction that Smith would perhaps not be …
Listening to Rosanne Cash
Franke’s last chapter is called “The Many and the One.” It should be called “The Many, the One, and the Excluded.” He wants this whole thing to be a perichoretic dance, to be sure. But before we clasp hands in a mountain meadow, and sing a gentle chorus of inclusivity, we have to do something …
This Kind of Thought Porridge
Franke begins the next chapter with, “The one truth is, and can only be, expressed in plurality” (p. 115). So that means the sentence bearing that claim, being one, isn’t really true. Of course if we added a sentence saying that truth is sometimes expressed without plurality, then it could have been true. But why …
The Prison Has Both a Right and Left Wing
Franke’s next chapter is on deconstruction, which to him is one of the operations of the Holy Ghost. The Other rescues the voices of those who have been “excluded, marginalized, and ignored” (p. 103) — examples might include the writers of the neo-Confederate newsletters that I mentioned previously. In this chapter, Franke says that deconstruction …