My dream bookshelf
April 30, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Forget about e-books and such. I want this bookshelf!
A Miroslav Volf miscellany
April 29, 2011 § Leave a Comment
A wide-ranging interview with Miroslav Volf on forgiveness, reconciliation, Tony Blair, Trinity, leadership, and so on. Volf at his accessible and lucid (and erudite) best.
The “real man”
April 27, 2011 § 2 Comments
Just wanted to share a gem from Karl Barth’s Chuch Dogmatics on the nature of “real man.” It provides us with a wonderful directionality in our quest for true identity. This is Barth’s christocentricity at its best.
“Real man lives with God as His covenant-partner. For God has created him to participate in the history in which God is at work with him and he with God; to be His partner in this common history of the covenant. He created him as His covenant-partner. Thus real man does not live a godless life – without God. A godless explanation of man, which overlooks the fact that he belongs to God, is from the very outset one which cannot explain real man, man himself. Indeed, it cannot even speak of him. It gropes past him into the void. It grasps only the sin in which he breaks the covenant with God and denies and obscures his true reality. Nor can it really explain or speak of his sin. For to do so it would obviously have to see him first in the light of the fact that he belongs to God, in his determination by the God who created him, and in the grace against which he sins. Real man does not act godlessly, but in the history of the covenant in which he is God’s partner by God’s election and calling. He thanks God for His grace by knowing Him as God, by obeying Him, by calling on Him as God, by enjoying freedom from Him and to Him.”
-Karl Barth, CD III.2, 203.
Narnia lectures by Rowan Williams
April 25, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Listen to the 2011 Holy Week Lectures on the topic of Narnia stories presented by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Lecture 1: “Not a tame lion”
Lecture 2: “I only tell you your own story”
Lecture 3: “Bigger inside than outside”
In the words of Dr Williams, “These lectures will look at some of the most important themes in the novels and ask how far Lewis succeeds in giving new life to traditional Christian ideas about sacrifice, forgiveness and resurrection, doubt and faith, the divine presence in Jesus and the final goals of human life.”
Truth and beauty
April 25, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Rowan Williams on the relationship of truth and beauty, and how it relates to knowing and experiencing God. As Williams puts it, it is through beauty that we broaden the habits of the mind.
Grace “covers the shame” (U2)
April 22, 2011 § Leave a Comment
This song contains one of my all-time favorite depictions of grace. The line “She travels outside karma” presents, in my book at least, a spot on depiction of God’s gratuitousness toward us. The fulcrum of grace is, after all, a message about the possibility of revolutionary newness, about a divinely initiated transgression against the mythos of cyclical inevitability and the fatalism of lex talionis (the law of retribution).
Might not play directly. Press link to YouTube.
Grace
She takes the blame
She covers the shame
Removes the stain
It could be her name
Grace
It’s a name for a girl
It’s also a thought
that changed the world
And when she walks on the street
You can hear the strings
Grace finds goodness in everything
Grace, she’s got the walk
Not on a ramp or on chalk
She’s got the time to talk
She travels outside of karma
She travels outside of karma
When she goes to work
You can hear her strings
Grace finds beauty in everything
Grace, she carries a world on her hips
No champagne flute for her lips
No twirls or skips between her fingertips
She carries a pearl in perfect condition
What once was hurt
What once was friction
What left a mark
No longer stings
Because grace makes beauty
Out of ugly things
Grace makes beauty out of ugly things
