The Christian Humanist

Series Index Recently an intrepid group of students and faculty at Emmanuel College began a school-year-long adventure in philosophy, planning together to read Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations together, a bit at a time,…

Why Can’t Grad School Be Purgatorial? No, good reader, that would be too easy.  Graduate school itself wasn’t much at all like Purgatory.  After all, the conditions for my leaving…

David Grubbs holds forth with Nathan Gilmour and Michial Farmer about allegory, both as a mode of reading and as a literary genre. The debate hinges on what terms mean…

Anyone who’s spent any time at all with the New Testament is familiar with the opening sentences of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the…

In 1966, Ralph Harper, the Episcopal priest and expositor of existentialism, found himself in the middle of the alienating twentieth century. Spiritual alienation, of course, existed long before 1966, and…

Intros, and welcome to our guest panelist Knowing Why the topic Defining some terms Torn and the Gay Christian Network Danny Cortez and the SBC Why this topic is important…

Gene Simmons: “Rock Is Finally Dead” The Parable of the Madman from The Gay Science might seem a strange partner for a Gene Simmons interview, but the latter made me think of…

Nathan Gilmour hosts a conversation about the five “proofs of God” from the opening sections of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae. Our discussion ranges over what a proof is for, whether the…

For many Christians, their faith was born, wholly formed, 2000 years ago. The covenant established in the New Testament provides, for many, all the equipment for living the Christian life…

My father, a civil engineer, designs enormous conveyors which are used in rock quarries to carry stone to be crushed. The specifics of the designs are beyond my understanding as…

I’m teaching the Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius for the fifth time this semester, and today I remember that this book still stands as a magister of thought, provided I’m willing still…

I sometimes wonder whether I or Emmanuel College‘s New Testament professors teach more lines of Greek writing in a given semester, but in semesters like this one, I have to think I’ve…

Michial Farmer leads a discussion with Nathan Gilmour and a very ill David Grubbs on the peculiarly modern ecosystem of suburbia. Listen and hear why we hate American Beauty, what sorts…

I’ve never been fully fluent in the sociological terminology that usually accompanies these sorts of discussions, and I studiously avoid Internet neologisms that sometimes arise out of the same (though…

David Grubbs leads a discussion with Nathan Gilmour and Michial Farmer about what makes our podcast a particularly Christian endeavor. We also give our personal histories with the faith and…