the church and postmodern culture

The Liturgical Turn: Toward a Theology of Birth / An Advent Meditation

Joseph.  I’ve always found him extremely fascinating.  I guess that’s partly due to the fact that we’re told so little about him.  We know he was incredibly obedient to God.  He was present for Mary’s pregnancy, Jesus’ birth and childhood, but once Jesus grows up, he’s strangely absent.  The traditional reason is that he simply passed away. ... Read More

Towards a New Missional Mapping?

Jason Clark will be presenting this recent digest of missional theology later in November at 'Seek the Welfare of the City'. We thought that it would be helpful for you all to engage it here.  Is there any pointing mapping the missional church? Is there a future for Evangelicalism? Let us know. Towards a New Missional Mapping?  Read More

Specters of Rage in an Age of Change – Sloterdijk and the “End” of the Postmodern

Multiple Specters Perhaps we can adapt just one more time Marx's well-known and overadapted opening to The Communist Manifesto that a "specter is stalking" us. It was this same "specter" that Derrida back in the mid-1980s adapted in Specters of Marx to rejuvenate what by then was his already aging project of deconstruction to produce first the "political",... Read More

Do we really get Romans? A little Badiou and Žižek can help.

It's been said that reformations and revolutions in Christianity begin with a re-reading of Romans. That is certainly true of the Protestant Reformation with Luther's epoch-shaking insight into the meaning of the phrase "the righteousness of God."    It is true as well of Barth's commentary The Epistle to the Romans, which in the words of a Catholic... Read More

Frederick Douglass on the Economics of Human Stock and “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”

The following post comes from Cynthia Nielsen who is a PhD candidate at the University of Dallas and blogs at percaritatem.com. By the shedding of whose blood have we become one of the wealthiest nations in the world?  To begin an answer, why not turn to one whose back bore many a bloody lash for the sake of the so-called “American dream.”  In his 1852 oration,... Read More

Ecclesiology as a Rival “Ascetic” of Desire

(I have edited this post realising my most of the content was pre-mature, and please forgive any consternation this causes.  And apologies where the comments do not align with this truncated version) Within my PhD work I have ben trying to understand how capitalist markets affect Christian identity formation.  Within the work of Bernd Wannenwetsch, William Cavanaugh,... Read More

Response to “Some Provisional These” on Kingdom-World-Church

I want to continue the conversation (really just questioning) begun by James K.A. Smith between an ecclesiocentric view of mission and the "apocalyptic theology" of Halden, Kerr, and Siggelkow.  (James commented on the Preamble). Really, I'm not offering a defense of an ecclesiocentric understanding of mission, but offering critical questions springing from... Read More

Which Kingdom? What World? Whose Church? A Response to Some Provisional Theses

Of late, several comment threads over at Inhabitatio Dei have been occasions for some ships passing in the night (shouting angrily at one another as they sense some threat in the vicinity!).  These have generally come down to differences between those of us sympathetic to what some might call an "ecclesiocentric" understanding of mission and the purveyors of an "apocalyptic"... Read More

Fundamentalist Inversions: Some Postmodern Variants

I want to put on the table some recent inversions of fundamentalism expressed under the guise of postmodern re-alignments.  By fundamentalism I'm referring to the Christian fundamentalism created in the wake of the modernist debates in the US around the 1920 (a fun genealogy is here), not fundamentalism in 'general' if there is such of thing.  I want to... Read More