I recently read an excellent book, Fintan O’Toole’s, We Don’t Know Ourselves. It is a personal narrative of growing up in Ireland from the late ’50s to the present. It’s a wide-ranging book, covering politics, culture, social issues, economics, and religion, written with an engaging and compelling style. One of the recurring themes of the … More Truth, Fear, and the Church
After a brief hiatus, I’ve returned to active writing on this site. For my first post-hiatus activity, I’m posting a short piece that I wrote for a recent book: My good friend Tom Oord (https://thomasjayoord.com/) edited this collection with Alexa Oord. It contains short essays by around 90 contributors, including me. It’s available at Amazon. … More A Religious Koan: What Is the Sound of No One Conversing?
July 29, 2016 I’m reading a great book, David Halberstam’s The Fifties. It’s a journalistic look at major cultural (e.g., Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe) and political (e.g., Joseph McCarthy, Eisenhower) moments in America in the 1950s. Here are three excerpts from chapters on political trends. Although describing political dynamics in the 1950s, they are also … More American Politics: Nothing New Under the Sun
July 7, 2016 So, I’m writing a book on how to read and understand the Bible. The book is for undergraduates, not for theological professionals, so rhetoric becomes an important consideration–how to find the right way of saying things so that communication actually occurs. Communication in theological subjects is a challenge for several reasons. The … More Theology, Politics, and Rhetoric
We still have a highly conservative, rural Evangelical voice that is inflexible in its politics and fearful of urbanites, immigrants, and everything else that is different from traditional rural culture. … More Prohibition and Apocalyptic Politics
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