For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away.
Hope is difficult to speak about with integrity. Too often, it is made to sound like denial—like a way to silence grief, soften injustice, or sidestep the complexity of human pain: “Everything happens for a reason”, or “She’s in a better place now”. I am frankly sickened by how Evangelical Christians celebrate God’s leading them... Continue Reading →
I want to share a thought with you – a sort of hypothesis I am exploring. It is the kind of thought that in certain churches will guarantee excommunication – or at the very least ensure that your name is only ever mentioned in hushed tones – but it is too important not to share.... 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 →
So here I stand, with the spectre of the cross looming large, staring up at a Jesus who seems to me to be at once completely alien and yet so intimately familiar. The more I have read, the deeper I have delved into Jewish thinking in an attempt to better understand this most beautiful of... Continue Reading →
Penal Substitution Atonement theory has almost become synonymous with Christianity. So much so, in fact, that I suspect most Christians in the West are not even aware that there are alternative ways of understanding Jesus. I say “in the West” because the Eastern Orthodox churches do not (indeed, never have) understood the Passion of Christ... Continue Reading →
It was the kind of thing that was bound to get them crawling out of the woodwork. There is a certain type of Christian that just cannot resist embarking on a Crusade when anything that vaguely resembles a “just” cause presents itself. When Comino Carvallo intended to display his sculpture – a life-sized, anatomically correct... Continue Reading →
If you read the Bible and find comfort there, then I suspect you are not reading the Bible properly. Almost certainly, you have not fully understood what you are reading. The various texts that comprise the Bible were penned for a lot of different reasons: to preserve the history of a people, and to tell the stories... Continue Reading →
It is impossible to condense a complex anthropological work into a blog-sized space, even a blog-sized space that is significantly larger than blog-sized spaces are supposed to be. So if you treasure the work of René Girard, please understand that what is to follow is a very much reduced (and thus inevitably inadequate) summation of... Continue Reading →
Vapors In The Wind 