Monthly Archives: December 2010

It’s just me in today’s special episode of the podcast. As I mention in the show, I used to do this as a blog post every year, but it just makes more sense to make it a podcast instead. I won’t spoil my list in this post, but I will give you the promised list of websites and podcasts I read and listen to.

WEBSITES
If you listen to indie rock at all, you can’t escape Pitchfork Media. They’re occasionally aggravating, and they’re far too willing to jump on (or attempt to create) bandwagons, but they’re the most comprehensive review site for indie rock out there. They also post free and legal MP3s with many of their reviews.

Speaking of “free and legal,” that’s the mantra of the site Largehearted Boy, which also covers books.

Spinner is largely a music-news site, but they often have short interviews with bands and artists across the musical spectrum–and more importantly, they post a free MP3 every day. I don’t download everything from this site: only what sounds interesting based on their “Recommended If You Like” suggestions.

I’m not sure how many people know that Amazon has an MP3 section with a free sample nearly every day and outrageously low prices on albums the rest of the time. Amazon beats the pants off of iTunes and has little of the hipster attitude. (I stopped using iTunes over the summer after someone bought a bunch of iPad apps with my credit card and Apple refused to admit anything had happened. These things happen, and I understand that, and I don’t expect Apple to write me a blank check; an acknowledgement that this had been happening to a lot of people for several weeks would have been enough.)

PODCAST
If you’re not listening to NPR’s All Songs Considered, you’re probably out of the loop (or just have a vendetta against NPR). Yes, their tastes are dad-rockish, but they’re also quite broad, and when they do their periodic four-person shows, the show is great fun.

While we’re talking public radio, let me throw in a public for WNYC’s Soundcheck. This is probably the broadest source for music on this list–they cover everything from “classical” music to noise-rock. I don’t listen to them every day, but at least three times a week they do a show I’m interested in.

The other podcast called Soundcheck is run by a few guys from the Hartford Courant. Each week they review a new release (usually indie rock, though sometimes they’ll do the dance-pop every indie-rock fan but me seems to enjoy). They’re sometimes annoying, and they desperately need an editor, but they’re worth checking out.

A better music talk show comes from the Twin Cities 89.3 The Current. It’s called MusicHeads, it’s relentlessly upbeat, and it’s much tighter and more insightful than Soundcheck. It also has really fantastic theme music. (Anyone know what song that is?)

The AV Club’s AV Talk podcast covers television and movies, too, but once a month they do a massive music roundup that’s almost always worth listening to. (The television and movie podcasts are great, too!)

But the best music podcast out there comes out of WBEZ Chicago: Sound Opinions. Think of it as the music version of the much-missed At the Movies television show. Chicago’s two foremost music critics–Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot–take on a big subject and then review a couple of records every week. It’s a simple format, but I can’t imagine anyone doing it better than these guys.

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Hope you enjoy some of those. And please post your comments about my rather patrician best songs list here.

Thank you, loyal reader, for your, well, loyal reading this year. Here are our ten most popular posts of the year–or at least the ten posts that attracted the most web traffic:

1) Bible, Tradition, Theology, Pt. 1: The Nature of God (Gilmour)
2) Alienation, Existentialism, and the Theological Hole (Farmer)
3) On Specialization (Farmer)
4) Better to Be Beaten (Grubbs)
5) More on Marriage (Farmer)
6) Creation Doesn’t Stop at Harvest (Gilmour)
7) Why Getting Plato Right Does Matter (Gilmour)
The Hoosier on Daylight Saving (Gilmour–talk about a black-sheep candidate!)
9) Loose Thoughts on the Texas Schoolbook Controversy (Farmer)
10) Thy Kingdom Connected (Gilmour)
And our most-downloaded podcasts that we recorded this year:

1) Episode #21: Literary Criticism
2) Episode #10: Literary Hell
3) Episode #10.1: Comedy
4) Episode #14: Literary Genesis
5) Episode #17: Literary Theory and Great Books
6) Episode #9: Haiti Earthquake
7) Episode #13: Death of Conservatism
Episode #8: Apologetics
9) Episode #22: Stage Comedy
10) Episode #22.1: Science

All but the last two come from the spring season, which makes a certain amount of sense. Our most popular episode of the fall was #25: Plato.

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 2 January 2011 (2nd Sunday after Christmas, Year A)

Jeremiah 31:7-14 or Sirach 24:1-12 • Psalm 147:12-20 or Wisdom of Solomon 10:15-21 • Ephesians 1:3-14 • John 1:(1-9), 10-18

The best thing about apocalyptic visions is that they’re just over the boundary-line of history.  Whether in according-to-Collins apocalypses or simply in the oracles of the prophets, the Old Testament, setting the table for the New, presents promises of life without death, peace without strife, and in this week’s Old Testament text harvest without languishing.  Certainly those faithful of the age before us were no fools: even without a Martin Heidegger to formulate being-in-the-face-of-death, they had the Psalmist reminding them that a man has threescore and ten years, fourscore if he have the strength, and the book of Ecclesiastes, with its hand always in the soil, reminds the wise and industrious that the fruits of wisdom and industry will outlast the body of the wise and industrious man.  But there was always the sense, even in Ecclesiastes, that the true nature of existence, that wonderful bounty from which humankind has fallen, was just beyond a veil of shadow and sorrow.  If life now is always in the face of death, then the larger being-towards-death is itself, in turn, always surrounded by a life-prior-to-death, whether the Bible calls it Eden or Paradise or the Kingdom of Heaven, that keeps death from its victory.

Such complexity, truthful to the end about death even as it confesses a life before and beyond and in defiant of death, allows the writers of the New Testament to articulate the wonderful confessions of Jesus as sophia theou (1 Corinthians 1:24) and soter (Luke 2:11) and, in this week’s reading, as logos, ordering word.  The Greek tendency to make sophia something more ethereal and non-bodily than sophrosyne had to be a temptation, just as the urge to make Jesus a divine emperor-figure like the divine Caesars must have been strong.  But the soaring hymn to the logos that was with God and that was God in John 1 always pulls towards earth with every leap to the heavens–yes, the logos who became flesh had a hand in creating all things, but that logos also had a people and stood rejected by those people.  Yes, the logos makes known the very Father and Creator, but John must be in the story to make the logos known.  To think about the divine, the opening hymn in John insists, is to think about YHWH, and to think about YHWH is to think about Israel, and to think about Israel is always to think about Israel in relationship with one man, born in Bethlehem, preaching around the Sea of Galilee, crucified in Jerusalem.

It’s easy for me, as a college teacher, to start thinking about myself as some sort of emissary from Homer and Plato and Dante, an alien beamed into the world of high school dances and paychecks and students who play with their phones too much in class.  Times like Christmas, when I’m around the people with whom I grew up and with whom my wife grew up, remind me that whatever transcendence I reach for, whether that of the life of letters or, on a higher plane, that of a member of the Body of the King of Kingdoms, I always reach with an arm that once struck a bass drum for the Plainfield High School marching band, and when I attempt to persuade my own students to love Dante, I do so with the spoken dialect of a man not three generations removed from a coal mine.

When the divine comes from the rich and maddening mix of history and the historical always reaches forwards past the strong bonds of death and finitude, the reality that moves between the two, tense and beautiful and infinitely challenging, cannot but be a gift from God.  May the lives of the faithful always be lives of gratitude for the gift of such an existence.

• NYC vs. MFA: Two Literary Cultures that together define American literary fiction
• Why monarchism might be the only hope for Democracy
• Francis Fukuyama speculates on the conspicuous absence of a workers’ Left in America
• The latest study: people who consider themselves broad-minded tend to mistake an open mind for the inability to come to a conclusion.

Sometimes an extra line space could do wonders for incarnational theology:

Merry Christmas from all of us at the Christian Humanist!

If you’re a regular listener to the podcast (and if you’re not, you should be), you might have noticed that, when the subject of the Trinity comes up, I get nervous. I can talk about Roman history and Greek philosophy, about the Italian Renaissance and the Scottish Enlightenment without much of a pause, but when someone says perichoresis, I keep my hand on the handle of my knife in case something goes wrong. (Being a pacifist, I always feel guilty later about carrying a knife about.)

Examining the actual contexts in which the language of Trinity is important, this strikes even me as odd. After all, I sing hymns about three persons without a hiccup, and when I’m in congregations that recite the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, I neither stammer nor mumble when I recite. Whenever a group of people speak, sing, write, or otherwise utter “Trinitarian” to signify “who we are,” I’m right there in the mix.

But there’s the problem: there’s a difference between Trinitarian doctrine and Trinitarian dispute, between saying Trinitarian defines who we are and saying this or that variety of Trinitarian defines who you’re not. As long as we stick to the actual Greek text of the Nicene Creed (with or without the filioque—my tradition doesn’t even recite creeds on Sunday mornings, so I don’t have a horse in that race), I’m still doing alright. But when someone asks to make sure I oppose Modalism, I freeze. I don’t want to answer. After all, I know that opposing Modalism is how Arius got his start, and he ended up with a heresy. And when I try to be the staunch enemy of Arianism, I know that I’m just one misformed phrase away from Docetism. And when I condemn Docetism as Gnostic hogwash, I’m probably underplaying perichoresis to the extent that I’m wandering into Sabellianism. And when I shove Sabellius, there’s an equal and opposite reaction that’s shoving me back into Social Trinitarianism, which in some books is the same as Tritheism. And when I say that I’m not sure about any of them, I’m an agnostic! And so on.

I’m not saying that such disputes are unimportant. I genuinely hope that folks like David Hart and Fred Sanders and Jurgen Moltmann and the whole lot of ‘em keep doing their work. It’s important work. I plan to keep reading such work for the whole span of my reading life. But I’m not there yet. To be honest, when a flurry of exclusion-terms starts flying about, when people are trying to narrow down the positions that are faithful and those which lead astray, I’m inclined to let them fight it out and keep out of the whole exchange. Unfortunately, sometimes I stick around too long (I like to watch a good train wreck as much as the next guy), and I start to think that they’re simply batting about trivialities, sparring with one another in a contest certainly more important than partisans of this or that NCAA athletic organization but perhaps less so than people disputing the binding terms of the infield fly rule. What faith still claims me knows that such resignation is a function of my small patience and inadequate attention to theological detail, but I won’t pretend that I don’t think thus.

But I know that such thinking is a temptation, not a triumph. To pretend that Trinitarian disputes are trivia because they frustrate me would be not unlike declaring Stephen Hawking a hack because I still can’t understand the later chapters of A Brief History of Time. It would be to call automotive mechanics charlatans because I don’t understand the inner workings of a combustion engine more complex than a push lawn-mower’s. It would be to call mathematics sophistry because my mind breaks down trying to do non-Euclidean geometry. (I really don’t understand any of these, by the way.)

I write this not because I have an answer to the gulf between real theologians and the rest of us but perhaps to lend comfort to those among our readers who don’t feel adequate to this or that arena of theological, philosophical, scientific, or other intellectual inquiry. Rabbinic legend holds that some rabbis would not let a man read the prophet Ezekiel until he turned fifty, and Plato’s Republic recommends that nobody learn the tools of philosophical dialectic until she or he turns thirty. Myself, I couldn’t understand Hegel until I was twenty-seven and Heidegger until I was thirty-one. Perhaps the disputes about the Trinity wait for me over a horizon that I can’t see yet. Maybe I’ll learn to fix a car some day. Perhaps not. But that’s where I stand right now.

• FAQ: Should I do graduate school in philosophy? (not an xtranormal clip)
• Hauerwas on Leithart on Yoder on Constantine.  (HT Jeff Wright)
• Hey!  You left out a very important site here!
• Ph.D Comics on end-of-semester grading:
  

Revelation of the Magi: The Lost Tale of the Wise Men’s Journey to Bethlehem
Translated by Brent Landau
157pp.  HarperOne.  $22.99

When I discovered Midrash as an undergraduate Bible minor, I was immediately fascinated. The Rabbinic practice of expanding upon the Biblical text, providing details and linking characters based on linguistic connections (the old Rabbis did not believe in linguistic coincidence) seemed to me, someone freshly interested in postmodern philosophy and reader-response literary criticism, as evidence that those impulses were neither novel nor illegitimate but simply forgotten in the heady days of the Enlightenment. (I’ve since made peace with the Enlightenment, but I still think that the best of what we call postmodern has roots in Rabbinic and Scholastic practices.) When in seminary I discovered that our library had a multi-volume collection of Rabbinic Midrashim, I made a point of visiting those volumes every chance I got, and although I never did work them into my thesis, they were a companion to me all through my seminary years.

The Revelation of the Magi, although it’s a Syriac Christian text rather than an Aramaic Rabbinic text, has the same impulse as do those wonderul Midrashim: they take a tale of only twelve verses, a story whose characters have no origin save a direction (east) and a title (Magi) and whose plot tails off without any concern for what happens to them after they leave Bethlehem (T.S. Eliot poem notwithstanding) and crafts a wonderful and fantastic (in some older senses of both of those words) narrative that, until recently, remained untranslated from Syriac, waiting in the Vatican Library for Brent Landau to come along and put it in my hands.

Because my own scattershot history-reading always informs my Bible-reading, I’ve assumed for some time that the Magi from Matthew must have borne some relation to the Magi in Herodotus, the old ruling class of the Persian Empire. In my own imagination, their appearance, even had they not mentioned the phrase “King of the Jews,” would have made Herod quite nervous: after all, he had just been installed as King of the Jews by Marc Antony at the culmination of a bloody war with the Hellenized Parthian Empire. No doubt Herod would have recognized that the Magi were prominent persons in that still-looming empire, and when they started proclaiming that a new “King of the Jews” was on the way, he predictably took that as a threat to his own precarious throne.

The Magi in Revelation of the Magi (RM), it turns out, are not those Magi. Using etymology that Landau cannot discern in Syriac or Greek, RM explains to the reader that they’re called Magi because they pray in silence. The text is not unaware of the Persian Magi or that the term Magi had come to mean simply “sorcerer” in popular usage. In fact, they have to deal with the inhabitants of Jerusalem’s mistaking them for those Magi when they arrive in the city. But these Magi do not come merely from east of Bethlehem or from “the east” connoting former Persian lands; these Magi come from Shir, a legendary land at the far Eastern extreme of the world, a place where Seth, the third son of Adam, traveled with his aging father and learned the secrets of true worship lest they be lost in the fallen world. These Magi have lived near The Mountain of Victories and kept Adam’s secrets in The Cave of Treasures of Hidden Mysteries for generations, waiting for the appearance of the star that Adam prophesied would bring them salvation from the evils of the world. And so they do, for generations, until a star appears to them while they’re in the cave.

So that folks will want to read this book, I’ll refrain from further plot summary, but as the story develops, and as the Magi travel from Shir to Jerusalem and then to Bethlehem, the Syriac writer(s) weave throughout the story phrases and motifs from the New Testament, demonstrating an exquisite artistry with the sacred text that is a delight to read even for those who “know how the story ends.” And to prove that old texts have their own warped sense of humor, there’s even a baby-switch gag in which Mary panics because she sees one of the Magi’s mystical vision of Christ and thinks that he’s kidnapped baby Jesus. Of course, when she finds the real Jesus back where he should be, the infant gives her a long speech providing her anxious soul comfort. (Yes, you did just read that.  You really want to check it out now, don’t you?)

Landau’s translation, whose endnotes provide an exhaustive set of New Testament cross-references (which are not as useful because Harper saw fit to cut the pages unevenly for archaic feel rather than for endnote-checking ease), does not shy away from familiar King-James-flavored constructions, and the experience is a genuinely enjoyable Midrash on a familiar mini-episode from the New Testament.

Were this review simply of Landau’s translation and scholarly apparatus, I would have few reservations. However, his introductory and concluding essays make some moves that I really ought to call into question. In the midsection of the story, when the star appears to the Magi and beckons them to Jerusalem, the mystical Christ speaks about his omnipresence and ability to appear to the folks in Shir:

And I am everywhere, because I am a ray of light whose light has shone in this world from the majesty of my Father, who has sent me to fulfill everything that was spoken about me in the entire world and in every land by unspeakable mysteries, and to accomplish the commandment of my glorious Father, who by the prophets preached about me t the contentious house, in the same way as for you, as befits your faith. (13:10)

Landau’s footnote to this verse as well as the volume’s concluding essay point to this as evidence of an early “theology of the world’s religions” and speculates that the final episodes in RM might have been later scribal addenda geared towards taking the sting out of such an intellectual novelty. The problem I see with Landau’s approach is that he seems to apply a very modern understanding of “faith” without giving any lexical justification. In modern times, of course, phrases like “interfaith dialogue” and “faith-based organizations” are relatively commonplace: “a faith” in this language-game is Islam, Christianity, or something bearing resemblance to them, and there are a plurality of “faiths” in the world. In legal systems that recognize a plurality of incommensurable “faiths” or “religions,” such a use makes perfect sense, but in an intellectual context that knows syncretism but not pluralism, such a move seems strange.

Landau’s use of “faith” has some English attestations in the Middle English period (OED places one such use in the fourteenth century but does not find another until the mid-sixteenth), but Danker’s Greek-English lexicon does not indicate any such use in Biblical-era Greek, and I wish Landau had provided some evidence that Syriac as a language was in fact making late-medieval moves rather than just assuming that fifth-century “faith” was the sort of nineteenth-century “faith” that he seems to assume. More plausible, I would think, would be something related to the ancient use of the Greekpistis to signify a complex relationship between political loyalty, existential orientation, and public confession. After all, that use of “according to his faith” is already present in the Pauline literature (in the sense that each Christian is given Spiritual gifts “according to his faith,” and there’s less of a stretch involved if one assumes (yet) another Pauline echo rather than imposing modern-era religious pluralism on the ancient text.

One ought not judge a book by its front-matter, and in the spirit of letting the old book stand on its own, I can recommend this text for a fascinating look into the Midrashic mind of early Christianity. For the sake of disclosure (and to explain the post title), HarperOne did contact the CHP hosts about reviewing this book, and I did receive my copy free of charge. My review here, as in all my book reviews, is the truth as best I can tell it, and I did not think differently or pretend to think differently because I got a new book.

Merry Christmas from The Christian Humanist Podcast! Our introductory narration is, as you may have guessed, from the 1977 Rankin-Bass Christmas classic Nestor the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey. The song is Bill Mallonee’s “Sing Angel Choirs,” as world-weary but pious a Christmas carol as you’re likely ever to hear. It plays through at the end, and I encourage you to listen.

General Introduction
- Christmas makes Nathan sick
- The semester is over
- The Revelation of the Magi
- Feedback on Christian rock

Our Christmas Tradition
- A completely improvised Christmas poem from David Grubbs

The Hebrew Scriptures and the Incarnation
- God Is One
- Shocking Isaiah’s argument
- Genesis 1 and the Queen’s We
- If you understand this conversation, slap a rhetorician
- The value of sensus plenum
- Authors and the Author

Pagan Sons of God
- Holy Herc, man!
- Why God is better than Zeus
- Greco-Roman incarnation stories
- Christ as fulfillment of all myths
- Hebrew notions of the “son of God”
- (Technical difficulties notice)
- Why sustained meditation is important

We Let the Carols Do the Talking
- “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” and its list of Christological titles
- The bizarre origins of “Do You Hear What I Hear”
- Henry VIII, king of Victorian England
- An ex cathedra pronouncement that is so deep
- The forgotten verse in “O Come All Ye Faithful”
- Hark! The theology in Wesleyan hymns!
- A modern Christmas carol
- Katie Grubbs wages war on elision
- And now we take shots at stupid Christmas carols (You know you were waiting for it!)
- A New Kind of Response to Arius
- “O Magnum Mysterium”: inspiration for Nestor the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey

John Milton and the Incarnation
- Defend thy idols, Nathan Gilmour!
- Do we grade rough drafts?
- Satan’s Arianism
- The danger of sola scriptura
- On “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”

Christmas Without Easter
- Stevie Wonder makes an abomination out of the holiday
- “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear”
- Incomplete, not bad, theology
- Specificity and incarnation

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 19 December 2010 (Fourth Sunday of Advent, Year A)

Isaiah 7:10-16 • Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19 • Romans 1:1-7 • Matthew 1:18-25

I’m sure somebody has written on this parallel before, but I just noticed this year that the opening of the gospel according to Saint Matthew bears a striking resemblance to the start of the book of Hosea.  In both cases a man of unremarkable reputation is asked by a divine message to take on a woman who will get pregnant by means other than what a Jewish town would expect.  I have a hunch that the first community of Christians who heard Matthew read in the assembly would have heard echoes of that strange book, and if they had, they might have been expecting the birth of this new child to carry with it the same sort of message that came to Israel as Hosea’s children came into the world: Israel, you are not my people.  Israel, you shall be shown no mercy.

Of course, the Nativity texts have become quite familiar to the Church, so my guess would be that few of us note the surprising character of the next announcement: God will save.  God is with us. Out of this moment, when the respectable Joseph shows a fair bit of restraint in choosing a quiet separation when he had the option before him to make a spectacle of the unfaithful Mary, God will save.  Something has run amok when the moment that portends the judgment of Israel, the birth of an child outside the bounds of bloodline legitimacy, now serves as the means by which God saves Israel.  Something catastrophic has shifted.

Then again, perhaps the shift would not be so surprising to those truly familiar with the Bible: after all, this is no case of a wife who runs around with “other men” but a virgin (yes, alma in Hebrew is something different from parthenos in the Greek, but I’m working from the Greek here) whose child is conceived of the Holy Spirit.  Bastardy will still be on the minds of the people (in the Gospel of Saint Mark they call him “Son of Mary,” as clear an implication as one is bound to find in ancient Palestine), but the legitimacy of the child in this sense transcends, not transgresses, those customs that determine inheritance and social standing.  But make no mistake: Mary here, like Gomer before her, becomes a walking, talking allegory: where Gomer signifies Israel’s running-about with the gods of the Canaanites, Mary brings forth while YHWH’s movement in the world remains largely undetected to Israel and, even from conception, runs counter to the expectations of Israel’s mature sense of self.  Like the births of Lo-Ammi and Lo-Ruhama, the birth of Yesh’wa (that’s the one time this year I’m going to spell it that way) announces the oracle of God with the force of a name.

Placed next to this strangely allegorical text, the Old Testament reading for this week strikes another chord.  Again, most who have been in this or that congregation for very long likely have heard Isaiah 7:14 a dozen times.  It’s as standard as the Charlie Brown Christmas Special in December.  But the lead-up, the dramatic context of that utterance, is striking: King Ahaz, who was not as wicked as Manasseh but who doesn’t fare much better with the prophets, finds the prophet Isaiah in his chamber, and Isaiah not only offers but demands of him that he seek YHWH’s council.  Ahaz, who gets in trouble with the prophets precisely because he’s such a secular king, likely knows what’s coming: after all, he’s been in contact with the Egyptians, forging alliances to fend off the joint forces of Damascus and Samaria.  Given that Egypt is not merely a pagan nation but chief among Israel’s foes, the legendary beast of the Exodus, Isaiah could not have been the only one in Jerusalem unhappy about the alliance.  In a feigned moment of humility, he alludes the Deuteronomic text that Jesus cites against the devil, refusing to put God to the test.

Isaiah, of course, messenger of the divine, will not stand by as Realpolitik poses as piety.  What so many readings of Isaiah miss (but which the lectionary-editors were wise enough to include) is that the birth of Hezekiah (the infant born of the young woman in Isaiah’s day) is a sign that comes in spite of Jerusalem’s unwillingness to let YHWH have a say in how things go.  And indeed, by the time he learns to distinguish good from bad, the mighty Assyrian army has put both Samaria and Damascus underfoot without any help from Egypt.

Those who first heard Matthew’s gospel would have been familiar with all of this–after all, the Torah and the Prophets were the lifeblood of the early Church, even before what we know as the New Testament became widely-authoritative text.  No doubt they would have noted that the Machiavel on the throne in Jerusalem in Jesus’ day would not stop with refusing the prophet but would plot to kill the infant.  And certainly those early Christians, living on the other side of the Jerusalem Temple’s fall, would harbor no doubts that YHWH, acting through the body of Christ on earth, still stood to speak to a fallen but God-beloved world, whether that world refuses or embraces the oracle.  And today’s Christians would do well to note that God’s insistence upon having a say in the world ends neither in the eighth century BC nor in the first AD but continues and will continue until this secular age gives way to the final consummation of the Reign of God.

May the Scriptures remind and enliven our imaginations, and may we stand ready always to put aside our own devices for the sake of the Kingdom.

• How Moby-Dick prefigures Nietzsche.
• Alasdair Macintyre criticizes Research-I universities for not really being universities.
• Jay Bennet, Super-Calvinist, says, “Get the Christ out of Christmas!”
• A Message from your University President (parody or prophecy?)
• James K.A. Smith on the Secularization of Thanksgiving (a couple weeks late)
• John Milbank connects the secular, mediation, and the global Pentecostal movement.
• Is it bad that this article fills us with schadenfreude?
• Reading the Bible: to discover truth or to proclaim truth?
• How Zemeckis’s Beowulf should have ended (yes, it’s becoming a theme, but they’re funny!):