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.
In “Water Mission,” Jillena Rose offers a narrative of a childhood in Saigon, where she learned the prayer of “women in white silk laughing, letting water run over their fingers . . . another sound for praise.”
I first read The Fall of Interpretation (FoI) in the Fall of 2002. I had learned shortly before the semester had begun that the Philosophy of Language class I had signed up for was going to be taught by a new prof, some young guy who looked like he belonged in an Old Navy catalogue […]
In the timely experiment that is Parish Collective, Paul Sparks and Tim Soerens discuss their attempt to reconnect congregations with both locality and one another in a fragmented and detached society, providing us with a unique vision of what it may mean to be church in the twenty-first century.
In an interview toward the end of his life, Michel Foucault pointed out that for all the interest in power that his work had generated, he was really more interested in the subject and what effects various forces of power had in terms of creating certain kinds of subjectivities. Those of us who work within […]
Flannery O’Connor insists that good fiction must be grounded in place; in this essay, Andrew W. E. Carlson discovers that the same can be said for church.
I was downtown talking with people at Occupy Chicago last Monday, and I met a man named Les, who I mistook for the leader of the movement. I’m sure you all know that OWS is leaderless, but I’ve always assumed this is reall just code for Leader-Les, who happened to be a 67 year old […]
Writer Jeanne Murray Walker offers a mediation on leaving church and finding fellowship and peace at Produce Junction.
The tale of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” turns on the question of how to see the emperor: is he clothed in garments befitting someone of his noble station, or is he parading in nothing more than his birthday suit, exposed as vain and conceited? Likewise, Peter Leithart’s Defending Constantine turns on the question of how […]
