Fifth Sunday in Lent

‘I find nothing in theological Christianity to be more difficult for me to apprehend than the conception of Jesus Christ as a dying and reviving God. The Incarnation-Atonement-Resurrection complex shatters both the… Hebrew Bible… and the Jewish oral tradition. I can understand Yahweh as being in eclipse, desertion, self-exile, but Yahweh’s suicide is indeed beyond [...]

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Fourth Sunday in Lent

‘When we are being bluntly honest with ourselves, we know that what makes us most resist dealing seriously with Scripture is not fundamentally the Bible’s pre-scientific worldview or its historical obscurities. It’s the way it fingers all too accurately where we fall short here and now. What troubles us is not what is not clear, [...]

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Third Sunday in Lent

‘Anyone who forbids… grief must forbid, if he can, all friendly conversation: he must prohibit or extinguish affection; he must with ruthless disregard sever the ties of all human companionship, or else stipulate that such companionship must merely be made use of, without giving rise to any delight of soul.’

- Augustine of Hippo

‘At the very [...]

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Sen on Smith

More on Adam Smith, this time from 1998 economics Nobel laureate Amartya Sen.  The full article is here at the New York Review of Books, or in condensed version here at the Financial Times (registration required).
It is… worth mentioning… especially since the “welfare state” emerged long after Smith’s own time, that in his various writings, [...]

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Contracts and Character

I’ve run across a few passages from novels relevant to the last Milbank chapter reviewed here – dealing with the shift in our mode of dealing with one another from character and virtue – adherence to an external standard – to contracts founded on self-defined self-interests.
First, from Richard Ford’s The Lay of the Land, as [...]

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Second Sunday in Lent

‘In total, during the first eighty-eight years of the [twentieth] century, almost 170 million men, women, and children were shot, beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed, or worked to death; buried alive, drowned, hanged, bombed, or killed in any other of the myriad other ways governments have inflicted deaths on unarmed helpless citizens and [...]

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Theology and Social Theory, Ch. 2

Milbank’s second chapter is entitled ‘Political Economy as Theodicy and Agonistics’. Where the ‘New Science of Politics’ dealt with the origins of a secular space for power relations, political economy was more interested in how the mechanisms of power functioned. Crucially, its theory centered on the regular, unintended harmony of these mechanisms, in [...]

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First Sunday in Lent

‘In birth, two people go into a room and three come out. In death, one person goes in and none come out. This is a cosmic joke… There are philosophers who take this joke seriously. To their way of thinking, the only option in the face of death – in facing death’s absurd non-face – [...]

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