Carl Raschke

“There Are No Jobs” – Common Fallacies and Facts About Getting an Academic Job in Religion or Theology

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 […]

Carl Raschke

There is No Such Thing as “Church”…Just Us In Faithful Relation To Each Other

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 […]

Carl Raschke

The New Hegelian Moment – Why Postmodernism Needs to Retrace its Own Radically Real, Rational, and (Of Course) Rhizomic Roots

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 […]

Carl Raschke

Critical Theology for an Age of Global Crisis

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, […]

Carl Raschke

“Outlaw justice” – was Paul really a political theologian?

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 […]

Carl Raschke

The Strangest of All Things Pomo – the Resurrection!

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: […]

Carl Raschke

The exception rules, or why postmodern theology needs to think the impossible

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 […]