What Is It Like to Be a Christian?

While human existence in time is determined by the time of Jesus Christ, by the logic of the incarnation, passion, resurrection, and ascension, the predominant accounts of time in the modern West have proceeded from a very different basis. The implications of these approaches are not just a matter of epistemology, or of abstract doctrinal and philosophical claims. Instead, they have had, and continue to have, concrete ramifications for human life together. They have overwhelmingly been death-dealing rather than life-giving, marked by a series of temporal moral errors that this book hopes to address. As a counterexample, this book reads Søren Kierkegaard alongside Karl Barth to highlight the ways that both figures rejected a Hegelian approach to time that was, and is, not coincidentally intertwined with a racialized account of history and the co-opting of Christianity by the modern Western state.

Our guest for #333 is Dr. Kara Slade.

Kara serves as associate rector at Trinity Church, associate chaplain of the Episcopal Church at Princeton, and Canon Theologian of the Diocese of New Jersey. A native of Pensacola, Florida and lifelong Southerner, she received her PhD in Christian theology and ethics at Duke University in 2018, with research interests that include Karl Barth, Søren Kierkegaard, and the ethics of science, technology, and medicine. She serves on the Committee for the Priesthood of the Diocese of New Jersey and the General Board of Examining Chaplains, and is also the past chair of the Society of Scholar-Priests.