Carl Raschke

Carl Raschke discusses how critical theory might inform theology in an age of neoliberalism, political upheaval, nationalism, and the precariat class.

The study of religion, though far younger than many of its counterparts in the humanities, is now an established and well-recognized academic field. The American Academy of Religion(AAR), its flagship professional society, has expanded tenfold in the past half century from a fledgling association of mainline Protestant divinity school professors and college chaplains to a […]

As some kind of Christian most, if not all, of my life  I have always taken for granted – even if at times “taking” it also meant wanting to “leave” it – something called the church. The very title of this blog, i.e., “the church and postmodern culture”, assumes there is actually something “there” (a […]

Hegel is to philosophy what  the economist Joseph Schumpeter was to the concept of capitalism.  He embodies the historical inexorability of what the latter termed “creative destruction.” Very few philosophers, let alone theologians, who still after all these years of abuse continue to sport the name tag “pomo”, understand that if it were not for […]

Until the shocks to the world system in the past decade following the turn of the millennium  – e.g., the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, the global financial collapse of 2008 – the “postmodern era” was supposed to be a kind of immense carnival of peoples reveling in a new global prosperity, […]

The standard average Christian evangelical, or Reformed, reading of Paul makes him into a huckster of cheap grace. How many times have you heard a sermon on Romans, or a Christian song on the radio, or some radio plug for a new church or ministry, invoking the Reformation-revivalist message that it’s all about giving up […]

I’ve been reading two books of late that would seem to bear little relationship to each other, but actually do in a revolutionary and quite profound manner. The first is by New Testament scholar N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Fortress Press, 2003). The second is theoretical physicist Lee Smolen’s Time Reborn: […]

A number of years ago when I was a department chair I asked a certain administrator at my institution why he had not followed the rules in granting certain privileges to a certain faculty member that seemed to go against the very rules he himself had laid down. The response was classic, and since the […]

This review examines Crystal Downing’s Changing Signs of Truth, which successfully applies semiotics, an often arcane and inaccessible academic discipline, to the practical theological task of understanding the relationship between Christian faith and culture.