Christian Humanist Profiles

The one who saves his life will lose it.  The one who sows to the spirit will reap life.  I am the way and the truth and the life.  Life is like a box of chocolates.  Ways of life and forms of life and such matters concerning life have occupied sages and philosophers and poets and preachers as long as human beings became word-slingers, and yet attempting the good life seems to require that each generation start anew somehow, to shape lives and to seek life for the first time every time.  Meghan Sullivan and Paul Blaschko’s recent book The Good Life Method: Reasoning Through the Big Questions of Happiness, Faith, and Meaning grew out of a redesigned introduction to philosophy class that deliberately sets that shaping and seeking of a good life at the project’s center, and we’ll talk about that at some length before too long.  For now Christian Humanist Profiles is happy to welcome Dr. Paul Blaschko to the show to talk about that journey and that book.

Somethin’s brewin’ on the podcast.  I wonder what it could be?  If you’ve seen the stage musical version of “The Cotton Patch Gospel” you know what and whom we’re talking about, but just in case you’ve never heard that musical, or if you’ve not read The Cotton Patch Gospels, or if you have no idea about anything I’ve mentioned up to this point, you’re just the person to have a seat and chat with us.  Clarence Jordan, Georgia Baptist preacher and the best kind of trouble-maker, was preaching and starting up Koinonia Farm and drawing the wrath of the KKK and publishing a new version of the Bible and keeping entirely busy in the middle twentieth century, and we’re here to talk some about what he said and what he wrote, compiled in the recent Plough Publishing House book The Inconvenient Gospel.  Joining me is Bren Dubay, who runs Koinonia Farm today (and who no doubt will correct that verb as soon as I shut up here), and Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome her on the show. 

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.