Boyd’s first chapter, “The Kingdom of the Sword,” actually had quite a few good observations in it. He was very good in describing the way vengeance escalates, and how a particular civil order can confuse itself with the kingdom of God, and how Jesus told His followers that they were not supposed to function the …
Decorating Camels
I have begun to work my way through Gregory Boyd’s book, The Myth of a Christian Nation. This is not something I would ordinarily do unless I had some higher, selfless, and altruistic reason for it, that reason being an opportunity to fisk it here. So, here we go. The Introduction tells how the book …
Eating Out of the Zeitgeist Can With a Spoon
Rodney Clapp says a number of structurally admirable things in his conclusion, but he can’t get them to add up. He states, rightly, that baptism is a political act (p. 121). He says, also rightly, “for the baptized, nothing can be more basic or more significant than their baptism” (p. 122). Batting a thousand, he …
Simple Pimple
I have finished Rodney Clapp’s book, and enjoyed it a good deal. This post will be on his penultimate chapter — on violence and peace, and my last post, following shortly thereafter, will be on the central contradiction that has plagued Clapp’s attempt to work through these issues. This post will be fairly short because …
Scram, Padre
I am genuinely enjoying Johnny Cash and the Great American Contradiction. As I have mentioned before, Rodney Clapp is an astute social critic, and many of his insights are really valuable. But there are times, and this chapter is one of them, when the underlying incoherence of his political theology catches up with him, tackles …
Internationalist Power Monkeys
The next chapter of Clapp’s book, “Tradition and Progress,” correctly identifies one of the central tensions in American life. “The United States considers itself at once the most traditional and the most modern and progressive of Western — or any other — countries” (v. 63). We are far more religious than any other industrialized society, …
If My Luck Holds . . .
Rodney Clapp’s next chapter is on the tension between holiness and hedonism. Music with Southern roots exalts and celebrates two times in the week that are worlds apart and are very close to each other — Saturday night and Sunday morning. A recent example of this is the song Boondocks by Little Big Town — …
Our Intellectual Cheetos
In the introductory material, Clapp has noted many of the American characteristics that are in tension. In Chapter 2, he starts to get into the particulars, in this case the tension between lonesomeness and community. If there is anything that country singers are good at, it is “high lonesome.” And if there is anything else …
Hardscrabble Celts
The first full chapter of Clapp’s book is entitled “America’s Southern Accent” and shows, quite effectively, that when we talk about American culture generally we are largely talking about Southern culture — “but now southern identity, like the Mississippi in flood, has surged well beyond the banks of the South as a region. In so …
Momma Tried
I recently started reading Rodney Clapp’s latest book, Johnny Cash and the Great American Contradiction. It promises to be, in turns, exilarating and exasperating. Clapp is pointing out the contradictions of the whole American set-up, as embodied in Johnny Cash himself, and so I think I will begin by noting the contradiction that is going …