Finally, after two decades of hard work (or, well, more like two years of me kind of trying), Third-Way Allegiance: Christian Witness in the Shadow of Religious Empire is finally out. This is a collection of brief theological articles discussing everything from national holidays to Steve Irwin, from Star Trek to parthenogenesis (and nope, Mother Mary, female whipped-tail lizards, and marmokrebs decidely do not get […]
Mapping the Movies: 50 Films for 50 States – my home state, of course, is Taxi Driver.
Over at the NYTimes, A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis defend the slow and boring. MOVIES may be the only art form whose core audience is widely believed to be actively hostile to ambition, difficulty or anything that seems to demand too much work on their part. In other words, there is, at every level of […]
Next week we’re going to launch a multi-week symposium on Aaron Simmons’ new book, God and the Other: Ethics and Politics After the Theological Turn. Our contributors will be Christina Smerick (Greenville College), Stephen Minister (Augustana College), and Nick Trakakis (Australian Catholic University). We’ll roll out one engagement per week, with opportunity for comment and […]
Several recent posts on both mediation and The Other Journal have focused on the apocalypse and spectre of eschatological judgment. Indeed, the End of Days seems to be in the air at the moment, especially considering our recent cultural experience of the “delay of the parousia” when to the ridicule of North American news media […]
One wuxia film has withstood the test of time, and, in my opinion, stands head and shoulders above the rest of its peers, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon included: Zhang Yimou’s Hero (2002).
Dystopian novels—stories of the future going badly wrong—have apparently now surpassed the vampire and fantasy genres in the young adult fiction market. The books, and the phenomenon of their popularity, have provoked numerous discussions online, in schools, and in the sort of serious, adult magazines that teenagers don’t read. (We know this, of course, only […]
Read part one of our interview, plus two more of John Leax’s poems (and audio) here. An elder statesman in art and faith circles, John Leax (Jack to friends) is a poet and essayist of hard-earned, humble wisdom, and as such, he avoids the spotlight. The author of books like Country Labors: Poems for All […]
Not until very recently did I quite grasp Stanley Hauerwas’s somewhat famous sentence “Best is not a theological category.” It never quite made sense to me. It never struck me as false humility, even though a latent suspicion still remained. I mean, really, who says that in response to being named America’s best theologian in […]