Jeffrey Overstreet

Filmwell's Book of Filmmaker Wisdom, Excerpt 10: Bresson

From Notes on the Cinematographer: Accustom the public to divining the whole of which they are given only a part. Make people diviners. Make them desire it. Be as ignorant of what you are going to catch as is a fisherman of what is at the end of his fishing rod. (The fish that arises […]

James K. A. Smith

The Gift of Difference: Radical Orthodoxy, Radical Reformation

Chris Huebner and Tripp York have co-edited a new book that might be of interest to churchandpomo readers: The Gift of Difference: Radical Orthodoxy, Radical Reformation from CMU Press. The book includes a Foreword by John Milbank and contributions from D. Stephen Long, Craig Hovey, C. Rosalee Vellosa Ewell, Peter Dula, and others.  You can […]

Scott Bader-Saye

Flirting with Money

This essay asks, “What is money for?” and, in light of the current banking crisis, proposes that lending and borrowing can and should be ordered to the common good.

Amy McCann

Marrow

In “Marrow,” Amy McCann finds something sinister in the supposed comfort and beauty of a late summer evening, the birds roosting at dusk “something to nerve to.”

Adams Miller

Micro Review: On the Heights of Despair

A friend recommended E. M. Cioran’s On the Heights of Despair (University of Chicago Press, 1996).  Cioran is a kind of 20th century, Romanian Nietzsche who “denounced systematic thought and abstract speculation in favor of indulgence in personal reflection and passionate lyricism.” “I’ve invented nothing,” he said, “I’ve simply been the secretary of my sensations.” It will […]

Carl Raschke

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 […]

Adams Miller

Speculative Grace: Compulsion & Repetition

    I. Short Version       Speculating this week – with one eye on Lacan, one eye on the Buddha, and one eye on Paul – about the nature of sin.  In brief:       1. Say that sin is “the compulsion to repeat.” Or, perhaps better, the necessity of repetition experienced as a compulsion. […]