How Many White Men Does it Take . . . ?

OK, the answer is–whatever the punchline–
That’s not funny!
I was going to ask, “How many white men does it take to say a bland and boring prayer?” But it turns out that white guys are more sensitive than I realized.
Some of my brethren were offended and hurt by the Rev. Joseph Lowery’s rhyming conclusion to his [...]

A Post-Racist World

Two years ago Jürgen Moltmann was interviewed on his 80th birthday.  The interviewer asked him if young people need to be given more evidence for belief in God.  Looking back over the horrors of the earlier years of the twentieth century and then the amazing changes that came in the late 1980s and early 1990s, [...]

Peddling Peace

About ten years ago I went on a backpacking adventure on the Apallachian Trail with my daughter, who had just graduated from high school.  Some day I’ll describe some of our adventures, but right now I’m thinking of some of the interesting characters we met on the trail.  Some of them included men who had [...]

Self-Loathing Professors

Robert Alter spoke of literature professors who don’t like literature in his book The Pleasure of Reading (reviewed here).  Professor Bruce Fleming likewise lamented that literary studies are killing literature by forcing students to learn the jargon and arcane techniques of “literary studies” rather than actually reading great literature.
Hector Avalos is a professor of the [...]

Happy Birthday, Jean Calvin

This year is the 500th anniversary of Jean Calvin’s birth.  Most of the folks I associate with in theological circles have an important disagreement with the reformer–we believe that God ultimately intends salvation for all people.  But sometimes I think one of the important contributions of Calvin is that he was willing to leave that [...]