For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away.
All concepts of utopia are ultimately forms of tyranny. Whether those utopias are religious and promise some sort of Paradise; whether they strive for liberty through ideological frameworks like socialism, capitalism, or democracy; or whether they are socio-cultural and attempt to achieve harmony through celebrating a common cultural or linguistic identity, they all ultimately suffer... Continue Reading →
In a very real sense, I think, we become what we worship. Whatever higher power we regard as giving meaning to our lives – whether that is a deity, or an ideology (like democracy, or humanism, or Darwinism for that matter) – shapes our values, which in turn shape our actions, which inform the kinds... Continue Reading →
I think it would probably be fair to say that if Jesus really did rise from the dead, it would be one of the most significant events – if not the most significant event – in human history. It is the kind of event that, if we believed it to be true, would fundamentally change... Continue Reading →
In our discussion group a couple of weeks ago, somebody expressed a genuine curiosity as to why so many intelligent and learned people cling so vehemently to certain Christian doctrines in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. What makes otherwise perfectly rational human beings defend indefensible doctrinal positions? Why, for example, do so... Continue Reading →
Here’s the thing about history: History is not about events that happened; it is people’s stories about events that happened. The only way we know anything is through narrative; we make sense of our world through metaphors. All of our observations of the world around us first pass through the filters of our narratives before... Continue Reading →
I need to offer a revision of something I wrote a few weeks back. In discussing the Fall, I argued that we have set ourselves up in mimetic rivalry with God. I should, more accurately, have stated that we have set our God concepts up as mimetic rivals. The idea that any actual God would... Continue Reading →
From where I stand, the world looks pretty bleak. And it is not the Covid pandemic – although it is frightening in its own right – that has me terrified. I have spent a lot of time in recent years doing reading around Girard and mimetic theory. It has opened new doors of insight for... Continue Reading →
It is not the Bible that I reject; it is certain ways of reading it. Protestant Christianity today, in essence, has placed its faith in the Bible (as opposed to Jesus) as the revelation of God, and as a result has had to spend much of its intellectual effort defending this claim. In a very... Continue Reading →
Contrary to what many modern Christians would like to believe, Christian theology has never stood still. And that is because faith is not an answer we arrive at. From a Christian perspective, we already have the answer: Jesus. What Christian theology is trying to do is understand what the question is. And as any delving... Continue Reading →
American anthropologist, David Graeber, notes that “Western social theory is founded on certain everyday common sense, one that assumes that the most important thing about people is that they are all unique individuals. Theory therefore also tends to start with individuals and tries to understand how they form relations with one another”. This idea that... Continue Reading →
