Christian Humanist Profiles

Christian Humanist Profiles 249: Lyric Theology with Thomas Gardner false

Christian Humanist Profiles 248: Valerie Tiberius false

What’s on the table when we claim that a newly-discovered text came from a Biblical author? To answer that question might take an investigation that spans the Roman Empire, desert monasteries, New York City apartments, the academic publishing industry, and the libraries and universities that change hands during wars and elections and all sorts of other events that intervene between us and that glorious first century. Such a story is before us today, and Geoffrey S. Smith’s and Brent C. Landau’s recent book The Secret Gospel of Mark is going to show us just how complicated and sometimes how weird the world of textual criticism can be. Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome them to the show.

Tell me where you spend your Sunday mornings, and then where your grandmother spent her Sunday mornings, and I’ll venture a guess at what you think Christian art looks like. In the realm of Christian art that involves basilicas and mosaics the icon holds a special place: by some accounts mainly a window through which one looks upon divine reality, the artistry of the icon nonetheless promises a different view of the world we inhabit, and the Virgin of the Passion, if Matthew Milliner is right, seeks nothing less than to set the world’s eyes back on the Christ who saves by suffering and whose passion does not begin on a cross but in his very infancy. His book Mother of the Lamb: The Story of a Global Icon, from Fortress Press, tells the story of that icon, beginning as it does with an artist who departs an imperial city and continuing in our day as his work journeys everywhere people call out to the heavens. Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome Matthew to the show.

Christian Humanist Profiles 245: Ben Witherington & Jason Myers 245 false

Christian Humanist Profiles 244: Paul Blaschko false

Christian Humanist Profiles 243: Bren DuBray false

The book I expected to read would present all the ways in which human communities in the digital age are dealing with a decentralized authority structure, how any given woman or man might jump on the Internet, either through a browser or a social-media program or by some other means, and encounter half a dozen figures, all competing for status as authorities on the question at hand, disagreeing with each other not on marginal matters but on the most important, most central parts of the public policy or scientific finding or the political tension at hand. The book I expected to read would look at all that and warn me about the dangers of a post-truth world. Peter K. Fallon takes a look at the same stew of unstable sources and says, “How cool is that?” His new book Propaganda 2.1 from Cascade Books draws from the rightly-renowned examinations of Jacques Ellul and then launches forward, never denyinig the dangers of citizenship in an Internet context but also looking at the genuinely good possibilities that emerge. Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome Dr. Fallon to the show.

Walter Brueggemann did not only teach me to read the Bible: he taught me to read. In the twenty-two years since I first read A Theology of the Old Testament I’ve been bringing the questions that book poses to Biblical texts over to every literary text I’ve come across: in what ways am I reading primary testimony or counter-testimony as I take on Toni Morrison or John Milton or Sophocles? How are these texts relating to and creating audiences when I teach Shakespeare or Plato or James Baldwin? And where do my own readings fit into stories of interpretive and disciplinary conversations whenever I engage with any text? Those questions keep on doing their work in Brueggemann’s recent collection of essays Resisting Denial, Refusing Despair, and Christian Humanist Profiles is thrilled to welcome him back to the show.

I don’t often talk about my own high-school years on this podcast, but I remember in high-school jazz band playing a Christmas medley called “Heaven and Nature Swing.” It led with a “Caravan”-inspired arrangement of “We Three Kings”--if you don’t know “Caravan,” hit YouTube post-haste–and when I hear the hymn, these thirty years later, I always feel cheated when it doesn’t break out into snake-charmer saxophone runs at the ends of the rhyming lines. Today we’re not talking about jazz, but we are talking about what we think we should see and we should hear when we take on stories and characters that we think we know. Eric Vanden Eykel’s recent book The Magi: Who They Were, How They’ve Been Remembered, and Why They Still Fascinate treats the Magi (and my pronunciation of that word is going to move around as we talk–blame seminary Greek and T.S. Eliot) as a kind of jazz standard–we do well to study the first recording, and we also learn some really cool things when we take on later arrangements and reimiginings and even deconstructions of these mysterious figures from Matthew. Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome Dr. Vanden Eykel to the show.

Some intellectuals are famous, and some are intellectual-famous. N.T. Wright appeared on The Colbert Report, and Reinhold Niebuhr testified before Congress, and Cornel West was in a couple Matrix movies. George Lindbeck didn’t do any of those, as far as I know, but in certain circles of Christian theologians, he’s indisputably intellectual-famous, opening up possibilities for ecumenical engagement and influencing Stanley Hauerwas and attending Vatican II and such. My own engagement with Lindbeck has been almost exclusively with his 1984 book The Nature of Doctrine, so when I got a chance to read Shaun C. Brown’s recent book George Lindbeck: A Biographical and Theological Introduction, I came away seeing his work in that book as a chapter in a rich and rightly intellectual-famous career. Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome the Doctor Reverend Brown to the show.

“Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” I pray those words every Sunday morning at Bogart Christian Church, and I think I have a basic idea of what I mean when I do. But that sense of solid knowledge conceals philosophical and theological disputes not only what the verb “to forgive” and the noun “forgiveness” mean but also how those realities relate to violence, reconciliation, narrative, memory, and all sorts of other complex matters. In his recent book Forgiveness: An Alternative Account, Matthew Ichihashi Potts proposes that to ask God to forgive us as we forgive is a matter of analogy, not identity, and the temporality and finitude of human existence stand crucially important to our understanding and our practicing forgiveness. Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome the Doctor Reverend Potts to the show.

Every ethics presumes a sociology. That formula has followed me through nearly twenty-five years of study, and its source text, After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre, has been a constant conversation partner as I have studied and taught. What I haven’t attended to nearly enough is the life of the human being behind After Virtue, but Nathan Pinkoski is here to remedy that. His translation of Emile Perrau-Saussine’s book Alasdair MacIntyre: An Intellectual Biography walks through the where and the who and the what and the how that got MacIntyre asking the questions that have become my own, and Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome him to the show.

When we set several theologies next to each other, naming their core claims helps us to make sense of their relationships, even as we grant that more complexity rewards careful reading and study. So without necessarily reducing them, we can speak and write about Calvin’s theology of sovereignty, Schleiermacher’s theology of experience, Bultmann’s theology of kerygma, Thomas Aquinas’s theology of revelation, and so on. In his book Theology of Consent from SacraSage, Jonathan Foster proposes a certain notion of consent, borrowing elements from Rene Girard’s mimetic theory and others from Alfred North Whitehead’s process thought, to make a bid for our understanding of the ways in which we engage with God. Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome Dr. Foster to talk with us about some of his ideas.

As a student in a good Old Testament Introduction class will be able to tell you, Genesis 1 borrows structures and symbols and maybe even vocabulary from Babylonian texts like Enuma Elish to paint its particular picture of creation. Likewise Proverbs 8 casts world-making in terms of international wisdom traditions, and John 1 appropriates Greek philosophical vocabularies to tell us of the logos who becomes sarx. In his recent book God After Einstein: What’s Really Going on in the Universe, John Haught presents some possibilities for God-talk in light of three great immensities with which modern science concerns itself: the great spans of time from the Big Bang to last week; the great spans of distance that an expanding universe encompasses; and the great spans of complexity that emerge with life, consciousness, and everything that comes with them. Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome Dr. Haught to talk about all that and more.

When my students ask me–and soon enough they learn not to ask me–I always tell them I’m an unrepentant left-winger; after all, I’ve never thought that a Capetian monarch should rule France, so once that question is settled, I’m pretty well in place on that question. Of course, the seating arrangements in the Estats General have come down to us as our lexical inheritance, so I suppose we should talk a bit about the Right. The good news here is that we’ve invited Matt Continetti to the show, whose recent book The Right gives us a good sense of the tensions that characterize conservatism over the last century or so.

Some truths seem self-evident once somebody has spoken them, but someone needs to make that move. So here goes: whenever any of us teaches, that teacher teaches something. Teaching a mechanic how to maintain an automobile’s engine involves things that teaching differential calculus doesn’t, and neither of those is quite the same as teaching Shotokan karate. Michael Burger’s new book Reading History from University of Toronto Press sets out to explore what it might look like to teach history, and Christian Humanist Profiles is happy to welcome him to the show to talk about that book and that enterprise.

I’ve had a working hypothesis for quite a while now that stories about the devil tell us about as much about an author’s priorities as anything else. Milton’s devils and especially his version of Satan lead a reader into some profound worries about the powers of rhetoric and reason. Goethe’s Mephistopheles can’t seem to keep up with the ambition of Heinrich Faust, and his attempts at temptation are farcical compared to the grandeur of the great man’s desires. And certainly nobody who’s read C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters can mistake the features of 20th-century life that stand as the Oxford Don’s pet peeves. Bart Ehrman, in his new book Journeys to Heaven and Hell, examines another kind of story, a set of narratives in which the living have a look at what awaits the dead, and discovers a similar dynamic: what’s magnified on the other side tells some fascinating stories about the struggles of this side. And I’m glad that he’s joining us on Christian Humanist Profiles today to talk about some of those stories.

When I started my undergraduate years at Milligan College in 1995, its interdisciplinary Humanities sequence was already a well-established hallmark of its educational project. In each of my first four semesters we read history and theology and literature and philosophy and all kinds of texts from different eras, always letting each inform the others. Dr. Roosevelt Montas’s journey from the Dominican Republic to New York City differs from my own from Indiana to Georgia, but we share a love for the questions that arise from these books and the life of teaching the same. Christian Humanist Profiles is thrilled to welcome Roosevelt to the show to talk about his new book Rescuing Socrates.

I’m still a young enough professor that I don’t remember a time before “critical thinking” was a buzzword in the profession. Back in the fall of 2000, when first I started, John Bean convinced me that the goal of core-curriculum classes should be to introduce novices to the practices and standards of the university disciplines, and I still think that’s about right. A decade later, concerns had shifted to helping students engage in metacognition, the examination of one’s own thought-processes, and I’m still a fan of that as well. But some time in the last decade, if you believe some social psychologists, something went seriously wrong in American epistemology through entire limbs of the body politic, and in response a new call went forth: critical thinking became less a bonus and more a bulwark, something to save us from the idiocy that so many of us invite into our eyeballs through our phone screens. Dr. Bethany Kilcrease’s book Falsehood and Fallacy engages in that rescue mission at the undergraduate level, using the tools of history to improve our habits of thinking. Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to have Dr. Kilcrease on the show today.

Victoria Reynolds Farmer talks with Amy Kenny about her new book "My Body Is not a Prayer Request."

Nathan Gilmour talks with John Dominic Crossan about his new book "Render Unto Caesar."

Christina Bieber Lake talks with Felicia Wu Song about her recent book "Restless Devices."

Nathan Gilmour talks with Larry Shapiro about his recent book "When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People."

Victoria Reynolds Farmer talks with Mary DeMuth about her recent book "The Most Misunderstood Women of the Bible."

Nathan Gilmour talks with Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn about her recent book "Ars Vitae."

Nathan Gilmour talks with Harvey Weingarten about his recent book "Nothing Less than Great."

Nathan Gilmour talks with Charles Moore about his recent anthology "Following the Call."

Michial Farmer talks with Randy Boyagoda about his recent book "Dante's Indiana."

Nathan Gilmour talks with Gary Dorrien about his recent book "American Democratic Socialism."

Nathan Gilmour talks with Thomas Jay Oord about his recent book "Open and Relational Theology."

Nathan Gilmour talks with Thomas Jay Oord about his recent book "Open and Relational Theology."

Katie Grubbs speaks with Sheila Gregoire about her book "The Great Sex Rescue."

Katie Grubbs speaks with Sheila Gregoire about her book "The Great Sex Rescue."

Nathan Gilmour interviews Bruce Chilton about his recent book "The Herods."

Nathan Gilmour interviews Bruce Chilton about his recent book "The Herods."

Michial Farmer talks to Jeff Bilbro about his new book, "Reading the Times."

Michial Farmer talks to Jeff Bilbro about his new book, "Reading the Times."

Nathan Gilmour interviews Tal Howard about his recent book "The Faiths of Others."

Nathan Gilmour interviews Tal Howard about his recent book "The Faiths of Others."

Poet James Matthew Wilson joins Michial Farmer to talk about Angelico Press's new edition of Claude McKay's "Harlem Shadows."

Poet James Matthew Wilson joins Michial Farmer to talk about Angelico Press's new edition of Claude McKay's "Harlem Shadows."

David Grubbs interviews Holly Ordway about her new book "Tolkien's Modern Reading."

David Grubbs interviews Holly Ordway about her new book "Tolkien's Modern Reading."

Michial Farmer interviews Robert Erlewine about his new collection of Abraham Joshua Heschel's writings, Thunder in the Soul.

Michial Farmer interviews Robert Erlewine about his new collection of Abraham Joshua Heschel’s writings, Thunder in the Soul.

David Grubbs interviews Jeffrey Niehaus about his recent book "When Did Eve Sin? The Fall and Biblical Historiography."

David Grubbs interviews Jeffrey Niehaus about his recent book "When Did Eve Sin? The Fall and Biblical Historiography."

Michial Farmer interviews the poet Charles Hughes about his latest collection, "The Evening Sky."

Michial Farmer interviews the poet Charles Hughes about his latest collection, "The Evening Sky."

Michial Farmer interviews David Deavel and Jessica Hooten Wilson about their recent edited collection "Solzhenitsyn and American Culture."