General Introduction
- Dr. Gilmour!!!
- We kid because we envy
- Listener feedback
- The delay in show notes
- What’s on the blog?

What Is Epistemology?
- It’s all indirectly Greek to me
- Mise en abyme
- Connection to metaphysics
- Epistemology junkies
- Invoking epistemology to affirm or deny metaphysics

Ancient Epistemology
- Forms and objects in Plato
- Another remove
- Innate knowledge
- Aristotelian observation
- Telos and the individual object
- Thomist epistemology and Thomist metaphysics
- The necessity of divine illumination

Descartes’ Epistemological Turn
- Hidey hidey hidey ho
- Doubt everything
- Je pense donc je suis!
- Augustinian influence
- Descartes’ unsatisfactory solution
- The Cartesian Reese’s cup
- The difficulty of refuting rationalists

The Rise of Empiricism
- Building ideas
- Nathan’s favorite skeptical atheist
- The elimination of causality
- Today’s inconsistent empiricists
- The cult of the scientist

Kant! Kant! Kant!
- The best(?) of both worlds
- Kant is hard
- Noumena and phenomena
- A priori categories
- On hating Kant more than you love Jesus
- Kant’s relationship to Hume

Post-Kantian Epistemology
- Analytic and continental
- Logical positivism and its heirs
- Hegel’s ghosts and organs
- Thomas Kuhn and the historical scientific question
- The epistemological humility of the Emergent Church
- Pragmatism

What Difference Does It Make?
- The message we must spread
- Breaking apart from the age
- Correcting the mistakes of others
- Avoiding the whig view of history

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle. Metaphysics. Trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred. New York: Penguin, 1999.

Augustine. Confessions. Trans. Henry Chadwick. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

Ayer, A.J. Language, Truth, and Logic. New York: Dover, 1952.

Berkeley, George. Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous. New York: Penguin, 1988.

Descartes, Rene. Discourse on Method and Meditations. Trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross. New York: Dover, 2003.

Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of History. Trans. A.V. Miller. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: And Other Writings. New York: Cambridge UP, 2007.

Jones, Tony. The Church Is Flat: The Relational Ecclesiology of the Emerging Church Movement. Minneapolis: JoPa, 2011.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Ed. Paul Guyver and Allen W. Wood. New York: Cambridge UP, 1999.

—. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. Trans. James W. Ellington. New York: Hackett, 2002.

Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm Freiherr von. Discourse on Metaphysics and Other Essays. Trans. Daniel Garber and Roger Ariew. New York: Hackett, 1991.

Lewis. C.S. “On the Reading of Old Books.” God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994.

Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. New York: Oxford UP, 1979.

Peirce, C.S. The Essential Peirce, Volume 1: Selected Philosophical Writings, 1867-1893. Ed. Christian J.W. Kloesel. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992.

Plato. Protagoras and Meno. Trans. Adam Beresford. New York: Penguin, 2006.

—. Republic. Trans. Allan Bloom. New York: Basic, 1991.

Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologica. Allen, TX: Christian Classics, 1981.

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 26 February 2012 (First Sunday of Lent, Year B)

Genesis 9:8-17  •  Psalm 25:1-10  •  1 Peter 3:18-22  •  Mark 1:9-15

When I do preach this on Sunday, I’m going to preach the entire Psalm, in case anyone is wondering.  My essay here will reflect all 22 verses, not just the first ten.

This likely makes me a bad systematic theologian, but I really enjoy the fact that the Psalms are so leaky, theologically speaking.   There’s no doubt that Psalm 25 finds its home securely in stories of sin and redemption and deliverance.  But there’s little sense in the text that those categories fit into any simplistic system.  The one asking YHWH to forgive sins is also the one calling for protection from the violent.  The one rejoicing in the goodness of YHWH is also the one calling on YHWH to remember.  This is no abstract system of thought but the song of people who live lives alongside and under and before and in memory of God, and the movement from section to section implies a storied life that demands both a bold crying-out in the face of injustice and a confident rejoicing in things unseen.  In short, the Psalm is a prayer and says what prayer is like, and that often means an acknowledgement of uncomfortable complexity.

To call such an outlook uncomfortable is not the same as saying there’s no comfort to it.  On the contrary, the persona’s voice in the Psalm (I’m still ambivalent, all these years later, on how to translate l’David) speaks with a strength of personality that I can’t help but enjoy, and more often than not I read the Psalms, especially the lament Psalms, for the sake of emulating their frankness about the world.  My own tendency is to turn bad events into mere material phenomena, to ask the rhetorical, “Well what did you expect?” when a more faithful soul would call out to God not to make sense of evil (that’s all too easy) but to remember God’s promises to do good for God’s people.  But for someone like me, someone entirely too modern for his own good and too given to materialistic explanation as a defense against the unspeakability of suffering and the powerlessness of mortals in the face of our enemies, the Psalms always stand ready to teach me how to be a sinner.  And how to be the righteous man, crying out in outrage.

That the same person should be both is no mystery to the systematic-minded, of course; certainly every system of theology worth studying does something to account for the persistence of sinful desire in the hearts of the redeemed.  But the Psalms aren’t giving an account: they’re the primary materials, the experience of being sinner and saint, translated into Hebrew poetry, set forth for us to recite and upon which to meditate and to preach, and we do well to remember that the “problem” of sin’s persistence, no matter how fascinating as a mathematical conundrum, always emerges from the experience of prayer before it becomes an object of contemplation.  That’s the balance that the Psalms lend to the spiritual lives of examiners like myself.

May our hearts cry out; may our theologies always rise from the rag and bone shop of the heart.

• Slavoj Žižek on some changes in capitalism that Karl Marx did not anticipate
• Some prognostications on the future of higher education in America: depressing or invigorating?
• College sports, Derrida, and Homer’s Iliad
• Kevin DeYoung on why to believe in a historical Adam
• James McGrath mocks Kevin DeYoung as uneducated
• Peter Enns offers a far more nuanced and irenic response to DeYoung
• 

Sorry it’s late, folks–I totally spaced on it!

General Introduction
- Nathan defends!
- How sound editing works
- Listener feedback
- What’s on the blog? And why NOT?

The Sidekick with a Thousand Faces
- Why does Campbell leave Wiglaf out?
- Marginalizing the sidekick
- Meditations on hero-life
- The lone knight and the languishing maiden
- Do sidekicks have an identity of their own?

Sidekick as Reader Surrogate
- A little dumber than the audience
- No unexpressed thoughts
- Robin as audience surrogate
- The blandness of the surrogate
- The death and resurrection of the teen sidekick
- Police procedurals

The Sidekick Ex Machina
- Its prevalence in children’s programming
- Looking down on the hero
- The eleven-year-old hacker
- Competent cartoon dads

The Ethnic Sidekick
- Justifiable uneasiness
- Searching for the noble ethnic sidekick

The Successor Sidekick
- Commander Riker
- The evolution of Ben Kenobi
- Extending the career of the sidekick
- The Adventures of Wiglaf

The Henchman
- The idiot henchmen
- The henchman switching sides
- Evil is more interesting than good
- How real supervillains act

Theological Sidekicks
- The disciples, the apostles, and you
- The beatitudes and sidekicks
- Sidekick, not maiden

Good question.  As some of you (my Facebook contacts, certainly) know, I successfully defended my doctoral dissertation yesterday afternoon, bringing a LONG grad student career to an end.  (To be fair, I have been employed as Assistant Professor of English for the last two and a half years of that, and in the 2004-2005 school year, I was not a grad student.)  But when I got to thinking about it last night, I realized that, when I started seminary (my first graduate school experience), the world was a different place.  So if you don’t mind a bit of self-indulgence (if you do, stop reading now), this is what I remember about the beginning of my grad school career:

• Nobody I knew had a DVD player
• Very few people I knew had mobile phones
• Nobody had ever heard of an iPod
• .mp3 was a format used by the dreaded Napster, and one could only listen to those .mp3 files on the computer or by burning them to a CD
• “text” was usually a noun and sometimes an adjective but never a verb
• Bill Clinton was the president of the USA
• Evan Bayh was a United States Senator from Indiana, and I hoped that he would run for president some day
• I had never heard of George W. Bush or Barack Obama (these are likely my own fault)
• The Indianapolis Colts were on a decade-long streak (with the exception of a couple happy Jim Harbaugh seasons) of pathetic football and had just finished Peyton Manning’s rookie season 3 and 13
• The New England Patriots were a second-rate AFC East team with Drew Bledsoe as their quarterback
• The Chicago Cubs had just made the playoffs for the third time in my lifetime and were finishing the subsequent season at the bottom of their division (okay, that hasn’t changed much)
• The big story in baseball was still the Sammy Sosa-Mark McGwire home run race (nobody was all that concerned about steroids yet)
• The Indiana Pacers were one of the powerhouse teams in the NBA (they’re not doing badly this season, actually)
• “WWJD” had just barely jumped the shark
• I was one of the few people I knew who actually wrote things for the Internet (those sites, mercifully, have disappeared into the ether)
• Google was one of the new search-engines on the scene
• “Alternative” rock had just recently given way to a crop of “boy bands” and to Ricky Martin on the radio
• The general consensus was that movies were smarter, on the whole, than TV series
• People were still holding out hope that the second and third Star Wars prequels wouldn’t be as wretched as the first
• People were convinced that the second and third Matrix movies would solidify that franchise as the new American mythos
• Cable TV news was in a perpetual state of panic about white boys with guns in high schools, not about foreign nationals with box cuttters
• MTV was still a significant cultural force
• Apple was still that company that made candy-colored computers for teachers
• The college freshmen whom I’m teaching right now were in first grade
• The easily panicked thought all the computers were going to shut down at midnight on New Year’s Eve, but nobody predicted the technical glitches that would change the course of U.S. history on November 7 of the following year
• I had high hopes of becoming a Ph.D some day–in Biblical studies
• I thought I had seen the last of the English department

Alright, folks.  I’m kinda defending my doctoral dissertation tomorrow, so there might be a lectionary post later this week, or the next one might go live next Monday.  Either way, I’ve got to get back to studying!  See you later!

• Nathan Gilmour is only familiar with two of Alex Preston’s top ten literary believers.  How many do you know?
• C.S. Lewis the lover of old books
• Thomas Frank (whom Gilmour likes and about whom Grubbs is not at all thrilled) on the Resurgence of the Right
• David Brooks on why every good radical should be a traditionalist
• The intellectual community as the core purpose of a college
• 

General Introduction
- Welcome back, Professor Grubbs!
- Welcome back, respectability!
- How did Nathan blog so much?

What Is Romanticism?
- Not the sentimental relationship
- Not the genre
- Not the global mindset
- The Romantic movement and the Enlightenment
- Searching for a starting date
- The problem with Romantic innovation
- Particular over universal
- Post-Enlightenment, not anti-Enlightenment

Political Revolutions
- American and French Revolutions and the Enlightenment
- Tempering the Enlightenment
- Where the French Revolution went wrong
- The Cult of Reason
- The Cult of the Supreme Being
- The Reign of Terror
- Napoleon’s Takeover

The Grimms
- Fairytale as new genre
- The rise of national consciousness
- Folklore
- From particular to universal
- The invention of childhood

“Self-Reliance”
- The one-sided Emerson
- The individual! The individual! The individual!
- Trust thyself
- Impulses from the devil
- And how is your Oversoul today?
- Consistency and contradiction
- Nietzsche and Emerson

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
- The individualistic epic
- Byron as Jackson Browne
- Byron’s satisfied unhappiness
- Model for the New Evangelicalism

Romantic Literary Criticism
- The rise of the English department
- Art as personal expression
- How the Romantics ruined Shakespeare
- The mirror and the lamp

The Good and Bad of the Romantic Legacy
- Individual experience
- Learning about emotion
- The apologetics of desire
- Originality and authenticity in religion
- Church traditions as folklore and baseball teams
- Subjectivity
- Existentialism Is a Romanticism
- The Christian Imagination
- Turning to the small town
- Nationalism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abrams, M.H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. New York: Oxford UP, 1971.

Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

Blake, William. Blake’s Poetry and Designs. New York: Norton, 2007.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays and Lectures. New York: Library of America, 1984.

Grimm, Jakob and Wilhelm. Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Trans. Jack Zipes. New York: Bantam, 2000.

Kalevala, The. Trans. Keith Bosley. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.

Poe, Edgar Allan. Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays. New York: Library of America, 1984.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden and Other Writings. New York: Modern Library, 2000.

Whitman, Walt. Poetry and Prose. New York: Library of America, 1996.

Wordsworth, William, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads. New York: Penguin, 2007.

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 12 February 2012 (Sixth Sunday of Advent, Year B)

2 Kings 5:1-14  • Psalm 30  • 1 Corinthians 9:24-27  • Mark 1:40-45

2 Kings 5 begins with an assertion that YHWH has been granting victory to one of Israel’s enemies, and that should grab any reader’s attention immediately.  Aram, one of the ancestral lands of Abraham (he resided there for a while after leaving Ur, and often the sons of Abram return there to find wives), has become, by the time of King Jehoram, one of Israel’s constant threats, always threatening to absorb its fragmented neighbors.  In a theological move related to that of the prophet Isaiah, the narrator of 2 Kings attributes the particular success of this threat to God rather than buying into the prevalent ideology of the day, a picture of the world in which victorious nations had victorious gods and weaker nations were witnessing the demise of their own deities.

But the narrator of 2 Kings is seldom interested in making things simple, and despite his military victories, Namaan, not the king of Syria but one of the great city’s generals, has leprosy.  Scholars dispute whether the ancient Hebrew word involved here named only the narrow range of diseases that its Greek analogue names or whether Namaan could have had some other skin disease, but either way, his success is sullied by a disorder that makes him unclean according to the Torah, the word of the same God who has granted him victory.

The grace on exhibit in this story begins with the fact that Namaan first hears about a chance for salvation from the disease because he has been attacking God’s people.  Had Namaan not enslaved the Israelite girl that tells his wife of the prophet in Samaria, the text at least implies, he would have lived with the leprosy for the length of his life.  So by acting as Israel’s enemy, Namaan receives an offer of friendship from God.  (For those who would write off the Old Testament as relentlessly and thus simple-mindedly ethnocentric, stories like this one should at least temper the stereotype.)  So ultimately the king (I take this to be Jehoram, but if anyone knows better, let me know in the comments) rightly suspects that Naaman is trying to rationalize an invasion when he sends word demanding healing.  This is a general who has attacked Israel before, now demanding in writing what on its face seems impossible.  Without a doubt 2 Kings means to paint him as a simpering coward, but at the very least there’s reason to believe that he is afraid of something rather than nothing.

When Elisha shows up the real story begins.  (Such is often the case in the books of Kings–the kings themselves are often side-shows to the prophets, who are the real stars.)  Making his own bold offer to the king, he draws the focus of the story away from the palace in Samaria and to Elisha’s own house.  In a strange breach of the expectation that travelers receive hospitality, Elisha does not greet Naaman at the door.  He does not come into the presence of the great Syrian to heal him.  Instead, he sends him to the Jordan, insisting that he wash there, a command that certainly resonates with us Christians (that’s where Jesus was baptized, after all) but also would have held a particular place in the imagination of Israel (that’s where Joshua led the people into Canaan, after all).

Namaan’s reaction to that command and the subsequent response of his servants really brings the story to a compelling high point.  If the Jordan river is good for healing, he says, then any of the good Syrian rivers should be just as good.  No self-respecting Aramean should be forced to honor Israelite history to receive gifts from the gods!  Left unchecked, the general might have left without receiving anything from the strange God of the strange prophet.  But his servants impress upon him an a fortiori logic that sways his strong will: if you would have done something grand and difficult to achieve this healing, shouldn’t you be all the more willing to do something as simple as washing in a river?  That argument is enough, and Namaan receives the healing that his captive Israelite girl first set him in motion to find.

Like many stories of the prophets, this one sets on their heads some of the core expectations of how gods behave in the ancient world.  Gods are supposed to look out for their chosen tribe, yet Naaman, the great threat to Samaria’s very existence, here receives the love of God.  (Jesus, when he points this out in a synagogue in Luke 4, very nearly gets killed by an angry mob.)  And although Elisha is involved, it’s not an oracle from the prophet but some down-to-earth reasoning from some unnamed servants that persuade Naaman to receive that gift.  As with many of the Old Testament’s great narratives, this story of the Aramean commander ends abruptly, without much along the lines of commentary, inviting readers to say how it might fit in with the grand story of God’s salvation.  On this side of Christ, it’s not hard to read this as a foretaste of the gospel that goes forth to the nations, that journey outwards that Acts presents.  In its own day this story, like Ruth’s or Jonah’s, must have been one more reminder of the unconfined freedom  of YHWH, that God who reveals God’s self “beyond the wilderness” (Exodus 3).

May our devotion to the one true God always respect the wildness and the grandeur of the name we must not take in vain.